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NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/MAGAZINE | APRIL 2009 


NATIONAL 





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AUSTRALIA GOES DRY 34 
CHANGING RAINS 60 
POLAR BEAR PARADISE 66 
NEW FAITH IN RUSSIA 112 
ate ae RACE TO SAVE THE FROGS 138 





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NATIONAL 
GEOGRAPHIC 


APRIL 2009 - VOL. 215 + NO. 4 
Australia’s Dry Run = 34: Farmers feel betrayed by the climate. 
By Robert Draper Photographs by Amy Toensing 


Changing Rains 60 Droughts and deluges could stir up political unrest. 
By Elizabeth Kolbert 


Svalbard’s Ice Paradise 66 Seals, bears, and birds flourish on Norway's islands. 
By Bruce Barcott Photographs by Paul Nicklen 


The Woman Who Would Be King = 88 _- Why did Hatshepsut decide to rule Egypt as a man? 
By Chip Brown Photographs by Kenneth Garrett 


Resurrecting Russia’s Church 112 The faithful search for a new, post-Soviet identity. 
By Serge Schmemann Photographs by Gerd Ludwig 


Vanishing Amphibians 138 Scientists race to save them from threats. 
By Jennifer S. Holland Photographs by Joel Sartore 





A Gordon's mossy frog plays dead at a South Dakota reptile center. 
The Asian species rolls over to fool predators. 
Story on page 138. 


PHOTO: JOEL SARTORE 


OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY 


NATIONAL 
GEOGRAPHIC 


DEPARTMENTS 


Editor’s Note 4 
Letters 8 
Your Shot 12 
Photo Journal 14 


Visions of Earth 16 





CULTURE 
Urban Chickens 


City dwellers are adding hens to their backyards. 





ENVIRONMENT 
Budding Pursuit --- 


Scientists seek signs that spring is coming earlier. 


SCIENCE 


SSS Best Guesses 
Estimating jelly beans calls for a scientific mind. 





LANDSCAPES 
Tahoe’s Unclear Future 
Famous for its sky blue hue, the lake is clouding up. 
WILDLIFE 
Birds of a Father 
A revamped family tree reveals unlikely relations. 
ENVIRONMENT 


i, Crude Currents 
How much oil has spilled since the Valdez disaster? 





ngm.com 


Inside Geographic 154 


Flashback 





® Picture the Weather 
Cameras can freeze all 
sorts of weather events 
in this era of climate 
change. Send your 
most dramatic shots to 

On the Cover ngm.com/weather. 
Hatshepsut wore a false beard to < a 

emphasize her royal power. 
Photo by Kenneth Garrett 








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EDITOR'S NOTE 


Samantha (at left) 
and Natalie Turner 
sweep sludge 
from a trough 

on their family’s 
drought-stricken 
farm in New South 
Wales, Australia. 





The diesel engine clatters to life. My friend Mike is giving me a quick 
lesson in how to operate his father's bulldozer. Accompanied by a cacophony of 
metal on metal, | maneuver pedals and levers. | lower the blade and begin knocking 
down trees. I'm helping build a logging road near Prospect, Oregon. Despite a lack 
of finesse, I'm making progress and having fun. I’m on top of the world. 

When | read Robert Draper's “Australia’s Dry Run” and look at Amy Toensing’s 
photographs in this month's issue, I’m reminded of that day three decades ago 
when | was young and didn’t understand the potential consequences of bulldozers. 

A decade ago the farmers of the Murray-Darling Basin were on top of the world. 
Their machinery had cut 15 billion trees; leveled fields; planted crops; built canals, 
weirs, and locks to divert water; and turned the basin into Australia’s breadbasket. 

Now the water is gone. A seven-year drought is taking its toll, and battles rage 
over the dwindling supply. “The last three years we've had essentially no water. 
That’s what's killing us,” says Malcolm Adlington, a dairy farmer who has had to sell 
all his heifers (six years ago he had nearly 500). There is no shortage of claimants 
for the water—from farmers to conservationists to the city of Adelaide. 

The bulldozers that reshaped the basin are gone. But questions remain. What 
caused the drought? Climate change? Is deforestation breaking the natural cycles 
of rainfall? Slowly, the questions are being answered, with solutions to follow. In the 
meantime, the world watches and, hopefully, learns. 


cos 


4 PHOTO: AMY TOENSING 





© mondboard/Corbis 


-_ 


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Atlantic 


Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche chlororhynchos) 


Ocean Size: Head and body length, approx. 81 cm (32 inches); wingspan, approx. 200 cm (79 inches) 


t AFRICA 
SOUTH, 
AMERICA 


Tristan da Cunha 


Weight: 1.8 - 2.8 kg (4 - 6.2 Ibs) Habitat: Breeds on Gough Island and islands in Tristan da Cunha archipelago; 
spends non-breeding season in ocean waters Surviving number: Estimated at 21,600 - 35,600 breeding pairs 


Photographed by Tui De Roy 


WILDLIFE AS CANON SEES IT 


Born to dive. When the Atlantic yellow-nosed 
albatross sees fish—brought to the surface by tuna 
and cetaceans or thrown as scraps from fishing 
vessels—it dives. But this habit can lead to fatal 
accidents when longline fishing is involved; the 
bird dives after bait, ingests the hook and is pulled 
under. These mishaps have made life more 
perilous for the albatross during its long sojourns 
at sea. Making landfall for breeding season in late 


August, monogamous pairs build pedestal nests 
of mud and vegetation, where the female lays a 
single egg. But because females are more vulnerable 
to becoming bycatch, populations are diving now. 
As we see it, we can help make the world a better 
place. Raising awareness of endangered species 
is just one of the ways we at Canon are taking 
action—for the good of the planet we call home. 
Visit canon.com/environment to learn more. 


Canon 





MeETTERS 


NEVIONEVD 
GEOGRAPHIC 


THE REAL 


Herod 





December 2008 


Herod: The Holy Land’s 
Visionary Builder 

The article on King Herod was 
most informative. But author 
Tom Mueller's statement that 
“Herod is almost certainly 
innocent of this crime” of 
slaughtering every male infant 
in Bethlehem in order to kill 
the newborn Jesus (offering 
no proof to back up this 
statement) makes me wonder 
whom | should believe: your 
author or Matthew in the Bible. 
I think I'll stick with Matthew. 


SIEGFRIED KLAMMER 
Mahopac, New York 


You can't have it both ways. 
Herod's chroniclers, who 

were eyewitnesses of the 
generation immediately after 
the fact, say he ordered the 
deaths of males born when 
Christ was born because he 
perceived them as a threat 

to his reign. We weren't sure 
Herod existed until Israeli 
archaeologists found his 

name on an artifact at Masada. 
Tom Mueller says Matthew's 
account didn't happen, and yet 
Mueller reports Herod—cruel, 
brilliant, and probably insane— 
killed three of his own sons 
and his second wife for similar 
reasons. So, Herod was a 


8 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


great, visionary, murderous, 
infanticidal monarch kowtowing 
to Rome on behalf of what? 

His own fatal vision? The 
greater good of his people? 
What is so hard to believe in 
Matthew's Gospel? 


FRANK AND AUDREY CARROLL 
Custer, South Dakota 


The fact that the accusation 
against Herod appears only in 
Matthew's Gospel does not 
make him “almost certainly 
innocent.” The lack of other 
ancient documents corroborat- 
ing the Gospel account is not 
evidence of innocence. The act 
of slaughtering infants was, and 
unfortunately still is, common. 
It would not have been an act 
so sensational that it would 
result in documentation. Look 
at the Holocaust or the more 
recent tribal genocides in Africa. 
People with Herod's disregard 
for the value of human life still 
are among us. 


GERALD M. PAULY 
Sacramento, California 


While modern scholars and 
revisionists may argue that 
Herod did not order the 
execution of the innocents as 
described by Matthew, it is still 
completely in keeping with his 
character. What cannot be 
argued is that his kingdom and 
all its “cloud-capped towers” 
were built upon a foundation 
of bloodshed, murder, and fear. 
The world can well do without 
such “visionary builders.” 


MARK NIELSEN 
St. George, Utah 


We received a great number 

of letters protesting the article’s 
statement that Herod was 
“almost certainly innocent” of 
the infanticide described in the 
Gospel of Matthew. In the sense 


that the accused is “innocent 
until proven guilty,” we stand by 
the phrase. Josephus, Herod's 
first-century biographer, makes 
no mention of such a crime, nor 
do any of the contributors to 
other Gospels of the Bible. The 
scholars consulted for our story 
indeed maintain that there is 

no archaeological or historical 
evidence that the killings ever 
occurred, beyond the account in 
Matthew, which was most likely 
written a century after the event 
was alleged to have taken place. 
That said, as the article points out, 
given the level of cruelty attributed 
to Herod, the killing of young 
boys in Bethlehem—or anyone 
else who posed a threat to 
him—would certainly have been 
consistent with his character. 


Not only was it a pleasant 
surprise to finally see the 
much vilified King Herod given 
long-overdue credit for his 
incredible feats of engineering 
and construction, as well as 
his skillful diplomacy, but your 
article also fulfilled my long- 
standing need to have him 
exonerated for the so-called 
Massacre of the Innocents, 
one of the cruelest and most 
unlikely fables in the Bible 
and one that was obviously 
concocted to fulfill prophecy. 
While Herod was no saint, 

few kings before or since 
have been. 


HARRY KATZ 
Southold, New York 





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METTERS 


The Stolen Past 

There's just no way archae- 
ologists are ever going to 
get the opportunity to com- 
pletely examine every article 
at every site that exists. 

A sampling will be the best 
that they can get. West Bank 
inhabitants have been cut 
off from earning a living, so 
either lift the travel bans 

and develop the economic 
infrastructure, or train leading 
citizens in each village in 

the basics of archaeology. 
They can put the people to 
work digging, with the under- 
standing that pictures must 
document the location of 
each find and each artifact. 
In return, they can get an 
authorization number and 
may sell what they find—with 
some exceptions, of course. 


In this way there is some 
control over the digging, the 
antiquities market is happy, 
and there is documentation 
for experts who arrive later. 
It’s not perfect, but it’s better 
than turning a precious site 
into a rabbit warren. 


J. MCFARLAND 
Stanfield, Oregon 


The Man Who Wasn’t Darwin 
I'm weary of hearing about 
Alfred Russel Wallace, the 
man who was cheated out of 
his place in history alongside 
Charles Darwin. Mostly | 
weary of the myth that Darwin 
espoused one theory. He had 
two—natural selection and 
sexual selection. He knew 

full well that he had amassed 
enough evidence for his first 
theory well before Wallace 


happened on the scene. But 

it was the theory of sexual 
selection that really fascinated 
him. Despite ample opportunity 
to observe this force at work 

in the jungles of Borneo, 
Wallace disagreed with Darwin 
on this powerful theory, and 
for this he shall be forever 
relegated to the lower pedestal 
of history. Darwin's second 
theory was the one most 
unpalatable to Victorian society 
(which worried him sick) and 
to our conservative education 
system today. Darwin alone 
shouldered the abuse. 


JAMES K. FINLEY 
Sidney, British Columbia 


Now that’s a photo [page 107] 
that truly expresses the nature 
of an animal! A life of working 
with animals in two of the 





MEET A FIERY GIANT 
WHO CONSUMES AS SHE CREATES. 


pes 


SAVE YOUR SUNDAY FOR 


KILAUEA 


OUNTAIN OF FIRE 


Funding provided by 





world’s major zoos has given 
me the hands-on opportunity 
to work with many of the 

birds known as ratites. Of the 
larger forms of these, rheas 
are skittish and relatively 
harmless, emus are potentially 
dangerous during the breeding 
season, ostriches always 
present a threat, and casso- 
waries are large, heavy, and 
possess a mind-set that 

poses constant danger to 
handlers. The eyes and attitude 
in the cassowary head shot 
are the finest depiction of 

an animal's apparent intent that 
| can ever remember seeing. 
Malevolence incarnate. 


JOHN T. HULLEY 
Brooklin, Ontario 


| would like to correct the state- 
ment that Alfred Russel Wallace 


was an Englishman. He was 
born and raised in Llanbadoc, 
Sir Fynwy, Mid-Wales. As such 
he would be a Welshman. 


JONATHAN MORGAN 
Cardiff, Wales 


Wallace was born of English 
parents in the county of 
Monmouthshire, which is now 
unquestionably part of Wales, 
although between 1542 and 
1974 its status was ambiguous. 
Wallace might have been 
surprised to know that some 
consider him a Welshman. 

In his writings he referred 

to himself as an Englishman 
a number of times. 


Reuniting a River 

Your article on the Klamath 
was fascinating, but | challenge 
one aspect. To describe large 


reservoir hydroelectric 
facilities as having no carbon 
emissions is scientifically 
unfounded. The World Com- 
mission of Dams (a nonpartisan 
panel of scientists, engineers, 
and policy analysts), ina 
2000 report, documented 
the environmental impact 
of large dams, including the 
climate impacts. They found 
that dams have a wide range 
of greenhouse gas impacts, 
from negligible in some 
locations to very significant 
impacts in others, in some 
cases nearly as great as 
fossil fuel power plants. 
The reasons for this are still 
under study. 
MICHAEL HOGAN 
Programme Director, Power 
European Climate Foundation 
The Hague, Netherlands 





IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN. 


FROGS 


THE THIN GREEN LINE 
APRIL 5 &PMam 


Funding provided by 


PBS. 


G@Johnson 





LETTERS 


Our nation is becoming 
desperate to remove foreign 
oil as a major energy source, 
so lam active in advocating 
more energy from streamflow. 
Hydroelectricity is the Pacific 
Northwest's biggest potential 
natural resource contributor to 
cheap, renewable alternative 
energy. Certainly fish runs 
must be preserved, as should 
agriculture, but is dam removal 
the answer? With all the dams 
on the Klamath and Trinity 
Rivers, could not more water 
be released to improve the 
summer fish-migration runoff, 
impounding water during 
maximum snowmelt? Maybe 
more dams are needed to store 
water in deep basins in the 
winter months. Cold water from 
the bottom of reservoir or lake 
impoundments should be 


released for cooler summer fish 
runs. | am delighted that the 
interested parties are going to 
find a solution. | hope they keep 
in mind that more cheap hydro 
energy is necessary if payments 
to foreign oil producers are 
going to be reduced. 


RAY O. SIMS 
Roseburg, Oregon 


You are correct in saying 

“The issues in play over the 
Klamath’s future are complex.” 
That is an understatement. 
Not all affected parties were 
invited to the conferences. 
Tonight in the local paper is an 
article about how the Siskiyou 
County Board of Supervisors 
opposes dam removal. This 
could turn uglier. Stay tuned. 


WILLIAM R. JANSON 
Montague, California 


Visions of Mars 

John Updike wrote about 
Mars with ecstatic enthusiasm: 
“In this tranquil desolation, the 
irruption of our live curiosity 
and systematic purpose feels 
heroic.” Our “heroic” efforts to 
study Mars and outer space 
seem to be misplaced, since 
the direct beneficiaries of this 
heroism are only two groups: 
the industrial establishment 
that produces the hardware 
for these explorations, and a 
privileged class of scientists. 


DARWIN TORRES-CASTILLO 
Pereira, Colombia 


| look up at Mars and wonder 
whether we'll ever get there. 
Space exploration would be 
an investment in our future 
and a benefit to all humanity. 
If such visionaries as President 





@ohnson 


A FAMILY ComPANY 





John F, Kennedy, rocket 
designer Wernher von Braun, 
and astronomer Carl Sagan 
were alive today, | think that 
we would probably be walking 
on Mars by now. | hope space 
exploration still stirs Americans 
to press on. Let's keep the 
dream alive and walk on Mars! 


RICK SCHREINER 
San Marino, California 


Necessary Angels 

The article was an inspiring 
story born of necessity. There 
are just not enough doctors 
and nurses to provide curative 
care. In the developed world 
we will have to move to the 
preventative model the story 
describes because we cannot 
afford our current health 
systems. But unlike the workers 
in India’s Comprehensive Rural 


Health Project, who are trained 
to provide care and advice, 
the caregivers must be our- 
selves. We currently eat too 
much of the wrong foods, 
smoke and drink too much, 
take too many legal and illegal 
drugs, and don’t exercise 
enough. When we can't find 

a doctor willing to prescribe 
antibiotics for what we think 

is wrong, we find one who will. 
Doctors and other health 
workers must be prepared 

to “prescribe” healthy living 
rather than tablets for every- 
thing. Maybe then we will not 
run out of money. 


JOHN R. ERREY 
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany 


Environment: Trash Register 
You point out that “drink cans 
accumulate unless a state has 


deposit laws.” This seems only 
partially true. | live in Oregon, 
which has a five-cent deposit 
on cans and bottles, yet | am 
still amazed by the number | 
see discarded along the road. 
| enjoy biking the back roads. 
Several days a month, instead 
of taking a training ride on my 
street bike, | ride my modified 
mountain bike and pick up all 
the cans and bottles | encoun- 
ter. Over the course of four 
rides, | collected over 600 cans 
and bottles. My sister-in-law, 
who lives in Michigan, points 
out that their ten-cent deposit 
has proved to be a major 
deterrent in the battle against 
littering. Maybe all states should 
implement a ten-cent can and 
bottle deposit. 


FRED TAFT 
Corvallis, Oregon 





fed sy 


A FAMILY COMPANY 





YOUR SHOT | ngm.com/yourshot 


Go Somewhere New wy shot Maps is a new ngm.com feature in which 

Your Shot images help create interactive maps of places including Africa, Mexico, Indonesia, 
and China. Click on the site’s maps to see photographs illustrating the specific locations. 
Your vacation pictures might make the cut—why not send them in and see? For guidelines, 

a submission form, and more information, go to ngm.com/yourshot. 





Amstelveen, Netherlands 


“It was a very foggy morning when 

| took my camera out,” says 24-year-old 
Eva Nahodilova, who shot this dock on 
a lake in Amsterdam. “All ways in this 
water kingdom are lost in the fog.” 


let Elk Grove Village, Illinois 


One misty morning just after a rain, 
Shadley the Labrador obeyed when Jim 
Pavletich, 44, gave her the command to 
sit—and he got his shot. “I take almost 
as many pictures of her as | do of my 
daughter, Ellie,” he says. This photo was 
voted an ngm.com audience favorite. 





12 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


A COMMANDING VIEW 
MEANS LITTLE WITHOUT 
COMPLETE COMMAND 
OF THE ROAD | 


ting the New Toyo NZA. It ee thatraide high fay not suggest great handling. 
But here, a wide stance | available AWD telps give road-gripping control. keombination that 
eomopiempents eEcs nature. And since yeu re more than one thing, so is 


toyota.com/) Nana @ TOYOTA 


Options shown, 62008 Toyota Motor Sales, USA. Ine. "4 moving forward 





PHOTO JOURNAL | bana RomaNorFrF 





Juana Emilia Perez (at far left) and family watch a rodeo. Few men are left in their Oaxaca, Mexico, town. 


Freelance journalist Only Women Tre annual rodeo at San Pablo Huixtepec 
Dana Romanoff began used to be a big event. Now organizers have to invite cowboys from 


this project during her 
internship with National 
Geographic. She lives 


other Mexican villages to get enough competitors—there aren't 
enough local men left. “When the boys turn 15, they go,” says Juana 


in Boulder, Colorado. Emilia Perez, whom | photographed watching the rodeo from a truck 
bed with other female family members (above). Her 22-year-old son 
will soon be gone too. He plans to leave to work in the United 
States, as his five siblings did before him. Due to riskier and more 
costly border crossings, Perez's sons, like many Mexicans living 





14 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


in the U.S. without papers, rarely chance coming 
home. | visited the small towns of Mexico's Oaxaca 
state photographing people and places left behind. 
Emigration is changing the societal structure here. 
Without men around, machismo is giving way to 
amore matriarchal arrangement known as pura 
mujer—only women. 

Families do try to keep in touch at call centers 
like this one (left) in San Pablo Huixtepec. Vicente 
Benjamin Adenas Rodriguez (foreground) opened 
the business after working in the U.S. for 15 years. 
“Women come here to speak with loved ones in the 
U.S.,” he says. “The recently married ones cry a lot.” 


“T never thought 

it could happ 
to me. 

A heart attack at 53” 


en 


~Steve A. 
New York, NY 
Heart attack: 


AEE Rare 


“T had been feeling fine. But turns out my cholesterol and other risk 


1/9/2008 





factors* increased my chance of a heart attack. Now I trust my heart to Lipitor. 
Talk to your doctor about your risk and about Lipitor.” 
e Adding Lipitor may help, when diet and exercise are not enough. Unlike some other 
cholesterol-lowering medications, Lipitor is FDA-approved to reduce the risk of heart 


attack and stroke in patients with several common risk factors, including family history, 
high blood pressure, low good cholesterol, age and smoking. 


® Lipitor has been extensively studied with over 16 years of research. And Lipitor is 





backed by 400 ongoing or completed clinical studi 


“Patient's risk factors include age, gender, smoking, and high blood pressure. 


IMPORTANT INFORMATION: LIPITOR isa prescription Your doctor should do blood tests to check your liver 


drug, It is used in patients with multiple risk factors for 
heart disease such as family history, high blood pressure, 
age, low HDI 
reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke and certain kinds 


(‘good’ cholesterol) or smoking to 


ries. When diet and exercise alone are not 





of heart surg 
enough, LIPITOR is used along with a low-fat diet and 
exercise to lower cholesterol 
LIPITOR is not for everyone. It is not for those with 
liver problems. And it is not for women who are nursing, 
pregnant or may become pregnant. If you take LIPIT( OR, 
tell your doctor if you feel any new muscle pain or 
weakness. This could be a sign of rare but serious muscle 
side effects. Tell your doctor about all medications you 
take. This may he Ip avoid serious drug interactions 


function before and during treatment and may adjust 
your dose. The most common side effects are gas, 
constipation, stomach pain and heartburn. They tend 


to be mild and often go away. 


LIPITOR is one of many cholesterol-lowering treatment 
options that you and your doctor can consider. 


Please see additional important information on next page. 


Arreritror:. 


atorvastatin calcium 


tablet: 


Ge a heart to heart with your doctor about your risk, And about Lipitor, 
Call 1-888-LIPITOR (1-888-547-4867) or visit www. lipitor.com/steve 


You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. 
Visit www,fda, gov /medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088. 


2009 Pizer Inc. All rights reserved, LPUOQ643K( 


IMPORTANT FACTS 


LOWERING YOUR HIGH CHOLESTEROL 


High cholesterol is more than just a number, it’s a risk factor 
that should not be ignored. If your doctor said you have high 
cholesterol, you may be at an increased risk for heart attack. 
But the good news is, you can take steps to lower your 
cholesterol. 


With the help of your doctor and a cholesterol-lowering 
medicine like LIPITOR, along with diet and exercise, you could 
be on your way to lowering your cholesterol. 


Ready to start eating right and exercising more? Talk to your 
doctor and visit the American Heart Association at 
Wwww.americanheart.org. 


WHO IS LIPITOR FOR? 


Who can take LIPITOR: 

* People who cannot lower their cholesterol enough with diet 
and exercise 

+ Adults and children over 10 


Who should NOT take LIPITOR: 

* Women who are pregnant, may be pregnant, or may become 
pregnant. LIPITOR may harm your unborn baby. If you be- 
come pregnant, stop LIPITOR and call your doctor right away. 

* Women who are breast-feeding. LIPITOR can pass into your 
breast milk and may harm your baby. 

+ People with liver problems 

+ People allergic to anything in LIPITOR 


BEFORE YOU START LIPITOR 


Tell your doctor: 

+ About all medications you take, including prescriptions, 
over-the-counter medications, vitamins, and herbal 
supplements 

+ If you have muscle aches or weakness. 

+ If you drink more than 2 alcoholic drinks a day 

* If you have diabetes or kidney problems 

¢ If you have a thyroid problem 


ABOUT LIPITOR 


LIPITOR is a prescription medicine. Along with diet and 
exercise, it lowers “bad” cholesterol in your blood. It can also 
raise “good” cholesterol (HDL-C). 


LIPITOR can lower the risk of heart attack or stroke in patients 
who have risk factors for heart disease such as: 
* age, smoking, high blood pressure, low HDL-C, heart 
disease in the family, or 
+ diabetes with risk factor such as eye problems, 
kidney problems, smoking. or high blood pressure 


Manutactured by Pfizer Ireland Pharmaceuticals, Dublin, Ireland 
© 2005 Pfizer Ireland Pharmaceuticals All rights reserved. 
Printed in the USA. 





Uninsured? Need help paying for Pfizer 
medicines? Pfizer has programs that 
can help. Call 1-866-706-2400 or visit 
www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com. 





Distributed by Parke-Davis, Division of Pfizer Inc. 
New York, NY 10017 USA 
LPIF Rev 2, Dec 2005 


Laererror 


atorvastatin calcium 


rabers 


(LIP-ih-tore) 


POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF LIPITOR 


Serious side effects in a small number of people: 

+ Muscle problems that can lead to kidney problems, including 
kidney failure. Your chance for muscle problems is higher if 
you take certain other medicines with LIPITOR. 

+ Liver problems. Your doctor may do blood tests to check 
your liver before you start LIPITOR and while you are 
taking it. 

Symptoms of muscle or liver problems include: 

* Unexplained muscle weakness or pain, especially if you have 
a fever or feel very tired 

* Nausea, vomiting, or stomach pain 

* Brown or dark-colored urine 

¢ Feeling more tired than usual 

* Your skin and the whites of your eyes turn yellow 

If you have these symptoms, call your doctor right away. 

The most common side effects of LIPITOR are: 

* Headache * Constipation 

* Diarthea, gas * Upset stomach and stomach pain 

* Rash * Muscle and joint pain 

Side effects are usually mild and may go away by themselves. 

Fewer than 3 people out of 100 stopped taking LIPITOR 

because of side effects. 


HOW TO TAKE LIPITOR 


Do: 

+ Take LIPITOR as prescribed by your doctor. 

+ Try to eat heart-healthy foods while you take LIPITOR. 

* Take LIPITOR at any time of day, with or without food. 

+ If you miss a dose, take it as soon as you remember. But 
if it has been more than 12 hours since your missed dose, 
wait. Take the next dose at your regular time. 

Don't: 

* Do not change or stop your dose before talking to your doctor. 

* Do not start new medicines before talking to your doctor. 

* Do not give your LIPITOR to other people. It may harm them 
even if your problems are the same. 

* Do not break the tablet. 


NEED MORE INFORMATION? 


* Ask your doctor or health care provider. 
* Talk to your pharmacist. 
+ Go to www.lipitor.com or call 1-888-LIPITOR. 


Lied 
helpful 
answers" 













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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢ APRIL 2009 


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Indonesia See dusk in the Dampier Strait through a half-submerged lens and glimpse two distinct worlds. Under 
a cloud-slung sky, fishermen work on wooden boats. Beneath a mirror-calm surface, waters flash with baitfish. 


>: DAVID DOUBILET 











a China A member of a ceremonial honor guard inspects his cohort’s alignment, making sure it's suitable for 


the arrival of world leaders at the 2008 Asia-Europe Meeting, held at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. 








United Arab Emirates Peninsulas of prosperity, the “fronds” of the $14-billion Palm Jumeirah—the first of three 
planned resort islands in Dubai—jut into the Persian Gulf. Building began in 2001; it may end in 2013. 





® Order prints of National Geographic photos online at PrintsNGS.com. 


PHOTO: ALEXANDER HEILNER, 





(©uLTURE 





In New York City, senior Urban Chickens in 19th-century Manhattan, hogs roamed 
gardener Abu Talib the streets and cattle grazed in public parks. Today, chickens are 


overseesithe Taqwa the urban livestock of choice, and not just in New York. City dwellers 
Community Farm and 


its 13 chickens: across the U.S. are adding hens to their yards and gardens, garner- 
ing fresh eggs, fertilizer, and community ties, with localities debating 
and updating their ordinances accordingly. 

Urban chickens fell out of favor in the last century because of 

industrialization and other factors. In the 1990s, though, they enjoyed 
a renaissance in the local-food-loving Pacific Northwest. The current 
recession and farm-to-table movement have taken the trend further 
still. “Just get a few chickens and you can feed yourself,” says Abu 
Talib of the Bronx's Taqwa Community Farm. “He who controls your 
breadbasket controls your destiny.” —Winona Dimeo-Ediger 


PHOTO: IRA BLOCK 









A man on a mission. 
Obviously, he's not out of breath. 


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ENVIRONMENT 


Budding Pursuit “1 love those first little green leaves,” says 
octogenarian Jean Combes of England's oaks in spring. Since age 
11 she’s jotted down signs of winter's end. Too bad her girlish script 
shamed her and she tossed her first decade of notes. Such data are 
vital to phenology, the study of the timing of nature’s cycles. The 
science is gaining visibility as climate change blurs seasonal lines. 

Phenological data goes back to at least A.D. 705, when Kyoto 
royals kept cherry-blossom records. In 18th-century Europe “it 
began as a gentleman's pursuit, one of vicars and spinsters,” says 
British environmental scientist Tim Sparks. Now anyone can sign up 
to contribute to one of numerous online databases worldwide. 
Combes takes daily walks to report first tree leafings to Nature's 
Calendar, a database out of the United Kingdom whose thousands 
of volunteers report on spring firsts (and fall lasts), from frog eggs 
to bird chirps to lawn mowings. Comparing old data with new shows 
the impact of rising temperatures, later frost dates, and more 
sunshine. As Sparks notes, “It's getting harder to answer the 
question: When does spring arrive?” —Jennifer S. Holland 





EARLY BLOOMERS 
Daffodil bloom dates 
near Cambridge, 
England; red line shows 
the trend over time. 


February 





Mar 


hoe de it Reva at 
1970 1980 1990 2000 


PHOTO: ALBERT G. RICHARDS, 
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STOCK 
GRAPH SOURCE: JOHN CLARKE, 

COURTESY NATURE'S CALENDAR, U.K. 





?, He Ll A A te L their mater. 
SUME Wintel vefleet the charatter rf thee 


Some vefleet the sZ7e of their Artameé. 


Robert Mondavi wanted to make wines that belonged among the world’s 
finest. And he wanted to make them in Napa Valley. Sometimes a dream is 
big enough to sustain you. Inspiring enough to become true. Today the wines 
of Robert Mondavi Winery stand in the company of the best in the world. 


era | 


fosertT MONDAVI WINERY 





Hit name ce on the bottle. tes steed it in itt 
+ 9 : (" ‘ . 


“aA. y ‘ Ns 
‘ ° 


SCIENCE 


Mind Games 
Lawrence Weinstein doesn’t 
know how many jelly beans 
are in this jar, but he has 
avery good guess. And it's 
higher than you might expect. 
Weinstein, who teaches 
estimation at Virginia's Old 
Dominion University, has a 
knack for solving problems 
with little data. His secret 
is more method than magic: 
Break questions into pieces, 
approximate, and use metric 
units for easier math. 

Fermi estimation, as such 
a method is known, helps 
experts decide if problems— 
from jelly bean counts to 
carbon counts—warrant further 
calculation. Precision isn't 
always necessary. Take sea 
level rise. By assuming the 
thickness of the Antarctic 
ice sheet (1,000 meters) and 
dividing that by how many 
Antarcticas he thought would 
cover the Earth (30), Weinstein 
surmised that melting ice 
caps could raise sea levels at 
least 30 meters. Though USGS 
reports suggest a 73-meter rise 
(80 meters if you include Green- 
land's ice sheet), his rough 
guess still predicts catastrophe. 
“| don't need to refine that 
number,” says Weinstein. “I'm 
in Virginia Beach. Either way, 
I'm underwater.” —Oliver Uberti 


You don't 
have to split atoms to guess how 
many jelly beans are in this jar. 
Simply break the problem into steps. 
Count the jar's radius (r) in beans. 
Estimate its height (h) in beans. 
Use these numbers to figure the 
jar's occupied volume: V = Ir? x h. 
Round Tl off to three. 

4 Gloat. (The answer is at the bottom 
of the first page of Letters.) 


PHOTO: MARK THIESSEN, NG PHOTOGRAPHER 








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10 million Accords have been sold in the United States since 1976, 
Building from a rich racing heritage and clever research, Honda 
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31 mpg” s 
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my: Actual mileage will vary: 
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MANDSCAPES 


Tahoe’s Unclear Future when Mark Twain visited Lake clarity, 1968-2007 

Lake Tahoe in 1861, he was so entranced by the sky blue trans- mee 

parency of its depths that he likened his boat rides to “balloon -20 ft 

voyages.” Nestled between the Sierra Nevada and the Carson 

Range on the California-Nevada border, Tahoe, among the world’s 40 t 

deepest lakes at 1,645 feet, still awes visitors with its clarity. -60 ft 
Yet old-timers and scientists can see a difference: Tahoe is 

clouding up. Monitoring by researchers at the University of -80 ft 

California, Davis, shows that clarity has diminished by a third. -100 ft 

People could see to an average depth of 102 feet in 1968 but On average, the eye 

only to 70 feet today. Light-scattering sediments carried by can see 70 feet down 

runoff from condos, marinas, and other growth on the shore have into Tahoe today. 


steadily dimmed visibility. Warming of the lake due to climate 
change could also dull the appearance because of a shift in 
nutrient mixing. Armed with data, partisans are seeing results 
from a Keep Tahoe Blue campaign. Additional runoff controls 
are planned for 2009. Tahoe can recover quickly, scientists 
believe, and attain the diamond-like clarity of old. —Tom O'Neill 








Runoff from developments is blamed for dimming Lake Tahoe's brilliant blue water. 


PHOTO: KEITH PRICE, 2VIEW. GRAPH SOURCE: TAHOE ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH CENTER, UC DAVIS 


sustainable options 

The products of American chemistry go into energy- 
saving materials such as insulation, weatherization 
equipment, lightweight vehicle parts, lubricants, 
coatings, energy-efficient appliances, solar panels 
and windmill blades. Chemistry is also at the heart 
of creating new and diverse energy sources. 


©2009 American Chemistry Council, Inc. essential, and americanchemistry.com are registered service marks of the American Chemistry Council, Inc 


WILDLIFE 





Red-crowned 
Amazon parrot 










Black-capped 
chickadee 





New data show that parrots, falcons, and 
chickadees are closely related. 






E Birds of a Father some birds that look very different— 
Versicolored emerald a ‘ meet . 
hummingbird say, bright hummingbirds and drab nightjars—are long-lost kin. 

Some never considered together, like songbirds and parrots, are 
really close relatives. Others that act similarly, such as falcons 
and other birds of prey, may be genetically unrelated. 

Those are just some of the sure-to-cause-a-flap findings of the 
Early Bird Project, a landmark study led by Chicago's Field Museum 
that compared the genes of 169 species and sequenced nuclear 
DNA from 15 chromosomes to fill in big evolutionary holes. The bird 
branch of zoology has always been a thorny one, with 

little fossil evidence to show stages of development, 

making anatomy, appearance, and behavior the main 
means of gauging kinship—until now. With five years’ 
worth of new data, other long-held beliefs may also fly 
right out the window. —Jeremy Berlin 












Little 
nightjar 


ge 
ri 





ART: ALDO CHIAPPE 


= \ = 


How Do You Spell Pearl Necklace? 


F-R-E-E. 








Stauer comes to the rescue! $295 necklace of genuine cultured pear 


ou read that right. If you'd like the 

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necklace absolutely FREE, all you need 
to do is call us today or log on to the 
website www.stauer.com. There is no 
catch. If you're wondering exactly how 
we can afford to do this... read on. 





Despite tough economic times, Stauer 
has had a very good year. It’s time for us 
to give back. That’s why we're offering 
this stunning, 18" strand of genuine 
cultured white pearls for FREE (you 
only pay the basic shipping and pro- 
cessing). This is a classically beautiful 
necklace of luminous, smooth cultured 
pearls that fastens with a .925 sterling 
silver clasp ($295 suggested retail price). 
It is the necklace that never goes out of 
style. In a world where some cultured 
pearl necklaces can cost thousands, 
shop around and I doubt that you will 
see any jewelry offer this compelling! 


Why would we do this? Our real 
goal is to build a long term client rela- 
tionship with you. We are sure that 
most of you will become loyal Stauer 
clients in the years to come, but for 
now, in this lousy economy, we will 
give you these pearls to help with your 
future gift giving ideas. 

We did find a magnificent cache of 
cultured pearls at the best price that I 
have ever seen. Our pearl dealer was 
stuck. A large luxury department store 





in financial trouble cancelled a large 
order at the last minute so we grabbed 
all of them. He sold us an enormous 
cache of his roundest, whitest, most 
iridescent cultured 5 %-6mm pearls for 
only pennies on the dollar. 


But let me get to the point: his 
loss is your gain. Many of you may be 
wondering about your next gift for 
someone special. In the past, Stauer 
has made gift giving easier with the 
absolute lowest prices on fine jewelry 
and luxury goods. This year, we’ve 
really come to the rescue. 

For the next few days, I’m not offering 
this cultured pearl necklace at $1,200. 
I'm not selling it for $300. That's 
because I don't want to SELL you these 
pearls at all... 1 want to GIVE them to 
you. This cultured pearl necklace is 
yours FREE. You pay nothing except 
basic shipping and processing costs. 
It’s okay to be skeptical. But the 
truth is that Stauer doesn’t make 
money by selling one piece of jewelry 
to you on a single occasion. We stay in 
business by serving our long term 
clients. And as soon as you get a closer 
look at the exclusive selection, you're 
not going to want to buy your jewelry 
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Stauer is a high end jeweler that 
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Smart Luxuries—Surprising Prices 





of fact, our average client spends more 
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Stauer was the largest buyer of carat 
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14101 Southcross Drive W.,, 
Staue 








Lucky fisherman “catches” $100,000,000 
treasure lost for 210 years under the sea 





A close-up view of Ameri 
fisherman, These long-lost 






’s First Silver Dollar recovered in the Gulf of Mexico by a commercial 
ns were part of the cargo of a Spanish warship that set sail for New 


Orleans in 1784. Experts value the treasure in excess of $100,000,000, 


Vast shipwreck treasure sees light of day. 
It was sunrise on an August morning when 
a fisherman and his crew cast their nets 
from his trawling vessel some 50 miles 
south of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. 
While trolling the depths, the net suddenly 
got caught and the captain could only dread 
the lost time and money that the damage 
would bring. As the tattered net emerged 
from the ocean depths, he spied what 
appeared to be clumps of rocks weighing it 
down. 

As the net hovered slowly over the 
deck, the contents poured out followed by 
excited cries of “Coins! Coins!” The captain 
quickly realized they had snagged a 
fisherman’s dream: sunken treasure! And 
not just any treasure, but early American 
silver dollars that had gone down 210 
years earlier. 

In 1784, at the end of the American 
Revolutionary War, a heavily armed ship 


The Origin of the Dollar Sign 


Ever wonder where our “$” sign originated? 
Numismatic experts believe that the 
American colonists abbreviated transactions 
in Spanish milled dollars by drawing a pillar 
wrapped with a scroll. Look carefully at the 


reverse of America’s first silver dollar and 


you will notice a pillar on each side of the 
crowned coat of arms. The pillar is wrapped 
with a scroll, approximating the symbol we 
use today for our national currency. Indeed, 
early Americans also called these coins 
“pillar dollars.” 





was bound for the port of New Orleans. On 
board was a fortune in Spanish Silver 
Dollars. These dollars were well known 
by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and 
other founding fathers of our nation. 
Hundreds of thousands of them were loaded 
for the trip to New Orleans, yet not a single 
one arrived. 

With no survivors from the ill-fated 
voyage, historians can only guess at what 
happened. Some say powerful storms 
took her down while others speculate it 
was treasure-hungry pirates. Whatever 
happened, the secret — along with a treasure 
valued near $100,000.000 in today’s dollars 
— was sent to a watery grave some 300 feet 
below the ocean’s surface. 

America’s first silver dollar. The 
favorite coin of colonial Americans, they 
were called “Spanish Milled Dollars”. 
Widely used and accepted as payment in 
the thirteen colonies, the United States 
government accorded them status of official 
legal tender. 

If the story of George Washington 
throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac 
River is indeed true, then doubtless it was a 
silver dollar like this one that made the trip. 

Unfortunately, even though they were 
struck in large quantities, not many Spanish 
Milled Dollars survive today. They were 
widely used in the United States through 
the Civil War. Then, the government 
withdrew them from circulation and they 
were melted down. 

History-Making coins at a bargain 
price. Due to the historic discovery of this 





Some 


ay powerful storms took down the 
Spanish ship in 1784, others speculate it was 
blood-thirsty pirates. Whatever really happened 
remains a mystery. 


treasure, GovMint.com is releasing America’s 
first silver dollars to the public for an 
amazingly low price. It’s a legendary silver 
dollar that belongs in every collection, For a 
limited time, these authentic silver dollars 
minted during the American Revolutionary 
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handling — a dramatic reduction from the 
market price of this coin anywhere else 
worldwide. 

Each coin has been individually hand- 
selected for quality from this spectacular 
find, is accompanied by a signed Certificate 
of Authenticity and protected in a full color 
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coin today. 

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Price subject to change without notice 


©GovMint.com, 2009 


















ENVIRONMENT 


Crude Currents 
Shortly after midnight on 
March 24, 1989, the Exxon 
Valdez impaled itself on Bligh 
Reef in Alaska’s Prince William 
Sound, The tanker leaked 
38,800 metric tons of crude oil, 
fouling 1,300 miles of coastline 
and wrecking the local fishing 
industry. During the next 

20 years, Exxon spent more 
than two billion dollars on 
cleanup and lawsuits. 

The accident served as a 
rallying cry for environmental- 
ists and prompted the U.S. and 
other nations to implement 
stricter standards for cargo 
vessels in their waters. In 2010 
a UN phaseout of single-hulled 
tankers, like the Valdez, in 
which a single steel plate 
separates cargo from 
sea, will take full effect. 
Improvements such as 
better radar and broad 
use of GPS navigation 
have also reduced mishaps. 

Scientists struggle to 
learn how much oil enters 
the oceans each year. The 
National Research Council 
estimates 1.3 million metric 
tons, with tanker spills making 
up 8 percent. Perhaps the 
most surprising contributor 
is Mother Earth, with seep- eran valerie 
age from natural deposits 
accounting for as much as 


This puddle 
consists of 
Venezuelan 

crude oil, 





46 percent. —Peter Gwin . . 
NORTH 
b BEA ° 
. or 
Q PACIFIC 
. wha ms OCEAN 
A WORLD OF SPILLS ~~ eo Mk 
This map shows the a ERICA i eas 2 
439 reported oil spills of EQUATOR = . ay ‘ e-, 
ten metric tons or more ¢ SOUTH ABT Sumimer: 1991 .. ~ 
from tankers and barges = AMERICA @ 260,000 metric tons 
between 1989 and 2007. »ACIFIC : (Largest spill) A 
PACIFIC ¢ a 4 4 
Since the 1980s, spills of OCEAN rey AUSTRALIA 
700 metric tons or more = om 3000 ° © nar 3 — 


dropped from an average 
of nine a year to four. 





& 3,000 


EQUATOR 





PHOTO: REBECCA HALE, NG STAFF NGM MAPS, SOURCES: INTERNATIONAL TANKER 
OWNERS POLLUTION FEDERATION; EXXON VALDEZ OIL SPILL TRUSTEE COUNCIL 








Stressed farmers in the 
rice-growing town of 
Coleambally meet to 
discuss slashed water 
allocations, which 
caused a 98 percent 
drop in rice production 
from 2006 to 2008. 
“The meeting was a bit 
scary,” says 74-year- 
old Frank Whelan (at 
center), who didn’t plant 
acrop for the first time 
in more than 50 years. 





36 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





“Sheep graziers are as 
tough as teak,” says 
Ed Lilburne (at center), 
who is auctioning off 
40,000 animals at a 
stockyard near the 
town of Hay. They 
need to be. Years of 
drought have forced 
graziers in the Murray- 
Darling Basin to sell 
stock to conserve feed 
and precious water. 





38 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « APRIL 2009 





Blasted by dust and 
wind, the Booth family 
farm hasn't seen normal 
rainfall since 1991. But 
Simon Booth isn't giving 
up: “I know what this 
country’s capable of with 
the right type of rain.” 
Until it falls, he grazes his 
livestock 400 miles away, 
hoping that drought is 
not, as some say, the 
“new normal.” 


40 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « APRIL 2009 





BY ROBERT DRAPER 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY TOENSING 


The climate betrayed him. 


On the side of a road somewhere in southeast- 
ern Australia sits a man in a motionless pickup 
truck, considering the many ways in which his 
world has dried up. The two most obvious ways 
are in plain view. Just beyond his truck, his dairy 
cattle graze on the roadside grass. The heifers 
are all healthy, thank God. But there are only 70 
of them. Five years ago, he had nearly 500. The 
heifers are feeding along a public road—‘“not 
strictly legal,” the man concedes, but what choice 
does he have? There is no more grass on the 
farm he owns. His land is now a desert scrub- 
land where the slightest breeze lifts a hazy wall 
of dust. He can no longer afford to buy grain, 
which is evident from the other visible reminder 
of his plight: the bank balance displayed on the 
laptop perched on the dashboard of his truck. 
The man, who has never been rich but also never 
poor, has piled up hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars in debt. The cows he gazes at through his 
windshield—that is all the income he has left. 

His name is Malcolm Adlington, and for the 
past 36 of his 52 years he has been a dairy farmer, 
up at five every morning for the first milking 
of the day. Not so long ago Adlington used to 
look forward to a ritual called a dairy farm 
walk, State agriculture officials would round up 
local dairy farmers to visit a model farm—often 
Adlington’s, a small but prosperous operation 
outside of Barham in New South Wales. The 
farmers would study Adlington’s ample grain- 
fed heifers. They would inquire about his lush 
hay paddocks—which seeds and fertilizers he 
favored—and Adlington was only too happy to 
share information, knowing they would recipro- 
cate when it came their turn. That was the spirit 
of farming, and of Australia. A man could freely 
experiment, freely reveal his farming strategies, 
with the quiet confidence that his toil and inge- 
nuity would win out. 

“That, Adlington observes today, “was before 
the drought came along” A decade ago, Adlington 
employed five farmhands. “It’s just the wife and 
I now,” he says. “The last three years we've had 


42 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


essentially no water. That’s what is killing us.” 

Except there is water. You can see it rippling 
underneath the main road just a mile from 
where his truck is parked. It's the Southern Main 
Canal, an irrigation channel from Australia’s 
legendary Murray River, which along with the 
Darling River and other waterways is the water 
source for the South Australia capital of Adelaide 
and provides 65 percent of all the water used for 
the country’s agriculture. Adlington possesses 
a license to draw 273 million gallons of water 


“We're always living in 
hope,” says Malcolm 
Adlington of Barham, 
who's sold off his dairy 
cows to provide for his 
family. With his govern- 
ment water allocations 
reduced to near zero, 
“our farm is for sale,” 
Adlington says, “but 
nobody's looking at it.” 





~ * 
4 
h, 


y 
4 


annually from the Murray-Darling River system. 
The problem is the water has been promised to 
too many players: the city of Adelaide, the mas- 
sive corporate farms, the protected wetlands. 
And so, for the past three years, the New South 
Wales government has forbidden Adlington 
from taking little more than a drop. He still has 
to pay for his allocation of water. He just can’t 
use it. Not until the drought ends. Adlington 
finds himself chafing at the unfairness of it all. 
“Tt’s the lack of rain,” he says, “but also the silly 
man-made rules.” Those rules seem to favor 
everyone except farmers like him. Meanwhile, 
he’s selling off his treasured livestock. 


a ah} 


“Tt’s easy to get depressed,” he says in a calm, 
flat voice. “You ask yourself, Why have I done 
it?” Malcolm Adlington didn’t use to doubt 
himself, but then he has not been himself lately. 
The drought has depleted more than just his 
soil. He finds himself bickering with his wife, 
Marianne, hollering at the kids. He can’t afford 
the gas to take Marianne into town as he used 
to. With all of the other farmhouses closing up, 
the nearest boy for his son to play with now 
lives ten miles away. 

Adlington has put his own family acreage up 
for sale. “Haven't had one person look at it,” he 
says. Not his first choice, obviously. Not what an 





Adlington would ever wish to do. But when the 
hell did his dad or granddad ever have to deal 
with a bloody seven-year drought? 

It has been three parched years since any 
dairy farm walk that Adlington can remember. 
Instead, there are morale-boosting events with 
upbeat monikers like Tackling Tough Times 
or Blokes’ Day Out—or Pamper Day, which 
Adlington’s wife happens to be attending today. 
At Pamper Day, a few dozen farming women 
receive free massages and pedicures and hair- 
styling advice. A drought-relief worker serves 
the women tea and urges them to discuss what's 
on their minds. They all share different chapters 
of the same story. 

“It’s been two years without a crop.” 

“The family farm is on its knees.” 

“We sold most of our sheep stock—beautiful 
animals wed had for 20 years.” 


“T can't stand lying in bed every night and 
hearing the cattle bellow from hunger.” 

Still, the most poignant gatherings are out of 
public view. One takes place in a modest farm- 
house near Swan Hill. A government rural finan- 
cial counselor sits at the kitchen table, advising 
a middle-aged stone-fruit farmer and his wife 
to declare bankruptcy, since their debt exceeds 
the value of their farm and a hailstorm has just 
ravaged their crop. 

Holding his wife’s hand, tears leaking out 
of his eyes, the farmer manages to get out the 
words: “T have absolutely nothing to go on f 

The woman says she checks every couple of 
hours to make sure her husband is not lying in 
his orchard with a self-inflicted gunshot wound 
in his head. When the meeting is over, the coun- 
selor adds their names to a suicide watch list. 

Back in Barham, Malcolm Adlington sits 





alone in his truck going nowhere—watching his 
herd dwindle, his meadows receding into desert 
scrubland. All he can do is watch. 


he world’s most arid inhabited continent 

is perilously low on water. Beyond that 

simple fact, nothing about Australia’s 

water crisis is straightforward. Though 
Australians have routinely weathered dry spells, 
the current seven-year drought is the most dev- 
astating in the country’s 117 years of recorded 
history. The rain, when it does fall, seems to have 
a spiteful mind of its own—snubbing the farm- 
lands during winter crop-sowing season, flood- 
ing the towns of Queensland, and then spilling 
out to sea. To many, the erratic precipitation 
patterns bear the ominous imprint of a human- 
induced climate shift. Global warming is widely 
believed to have increased the frequency and 


Flooded by Hume 

Dam in the 1920s, the 
Murray's riverbanks 
were once thick with 
river red gum trees that 
captured moisture and 
helped drive cycles of 
rainfall. The skeletons 
of submerged trees are 
now visible in a ponded 
portion of the river's 
upper reaches, exposed 
by the lowest water 
levels in decades. 





severity of natural disasters like this drought 
(see “Outlook: Extreme,” page 60). What seems 
indisputable is that, as Australian environ- 
mental scientist Tim Kelly puts it, “we've got a 
three-quarters of a degree [Celsius] increase in 
temperature over the past 15 years, and that’s 
driving a lot more evaporation from our water. 
That’s climate change.” 

It has taken a while for Australia to wake up 
to that reality. After all, the country was trans- 
formed by rough-country optimists unfazed by 
living on one of the least fertile landscapes on 
Earth. Australian scientist Tim Flannery calls 
it a “low-nutrient ecosystem,’ one whose soil 
has become old and infertile because it hasn't 
been stirred up by glaciers within the past mil- 
lion years. The Europeans who descended on 
the slopes of the Murray-Darling Basin—a vast 
semiarid plain about the size of Spain and France 
combined—were lulled by a string of mid-19th- 
century wet years into thinking they had discov- 
ered a latter-day Garden of Eden. Following the 
habits of their homelands, the settlers felled some 
15 billion trees. Unaware of what it would mean 
to disrupt an established water cycle by uproot- 
ing vegetation well adapted to arid conditions, 
the new Australians introduced sheep, cattle, and 
water-hungry crops altogether foreign to a des- 
ert ecosystem. The endless plowing to encourage 
Australia’s new bounty further degraded its soil. 

And so a river became the region's lifeline. 
Like America’s Mississippi River, the 1,600-mile 
Murray carries mythological significance, sym- 
bolizing endless possibility. Its network of billa- 
bongs, river red gums, Murray cod, and black 
swans are as affixed to the Australian ethos as the 
outback. From its headwaters in the Australian 
Alps to its destination at the Indian Ocean, the 
slender river meanders along a northwestern 
course, fed by the currents of the Murrumbidgee 
and Darling Rivers as it cuts a long borderline 
between New South Wales and Victoria before 
entering the semiarid brush country of South 
Australia and plunging toward the ocean at 
Encounter Bay. That its journey appears unhur- 
ried, even whimsical, adds to the river's legend. 

Progress, for Australians, has involved bend- 
ing the Murray River to their will. Over the past 





Robert Draper is a contributing writer for National 
Geographic. Amy Toensing’s photographs of Tonga 
appeared in the November 2007 issue. 


AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT 45 


RAINFALL 


Murray-Darling Patterns 
2001-2008 





Murray-Darling Anomalies 


1910-2007, in mm of rain (base average 1961-1990) 


300- 


Wetter than 
average years 


Drier than 


Above Average Below Much Lowest oe) ee 
average average below \ ' 

average 1920 1940 
Average Temperature Trends Anomalies 


1970-2007, in degrees Celsius 












Time period 
shown on 
map at left 





1 H ' 
1960 1980 2000 


1910-2007, in degrees Celsius (base average 1961-1990) 







Warmer than 
average years 






Cooler than 
average years 


1920 1940 








Time period 
shown on 
map at left 











' 
1960 1980 


A 19th-century 

surveyor judged 
South Australia lands 
north of this line 
too dry for farming. 


Murray-Darling 
Basin 


PARCHED LANDS 


The dry and marginally fertile lands of the Murray-Darling Basin were 
transformed into the breadbasket of Australia through a massive 
water-management program that dammed rivers, filled reservoirs, 
and tapped water for irrigation and other human needs. It was a 
precarious balancing act, until seven years of drought—and decades 
of warmer temperatures—brought farmers to their knees. Stoked 

by drought, deadly bushfires dealt another blow early this year. 


MARTIN GAMACHE, NG STAFF 


SOURCES: AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY; AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS; 
BRETT BRYAN, CSIRO; GEOSCIENCE AUSTRALIA; MURRAY-DARLING BASIN AUTHORITY 


46 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 








Encounter 
Bay 


INDIAN 
OCEAN 


A 














Canals and irrigated 
cropland 


Nonirrigated 
cropland 


Cattle and 
sheep grazing 


Nonagricultural 
land use 


Dairy* 
Cotton* 


Rice* 





} j 
4 ‘Brisbane 
. y 


Vineyards, fruits, 
and vegetables” 
By / §Gold 
“2001 cLusTERS (7 {Coast 
) 





THIRSTIEST CROPS 


Agriculture uses up most of the 
water in the Murray-Darling Basin, 
though only a small portion of its 
cropland is irrigated. Its thirstiest 


wy > pe es f iz crop is cotton, which in 2005-2006 
aes TB sctnte . used 20 percent of the basin’s 
¥ water, followed by dairy farming, 
& livestock, and rice. Grapes, other 


fruits, and vegetables use far less 
water and generate more income 
for the region than cotton. 


A wet spot is all that's 
left of Lake Boga, once a 
water-sports playground, 
since its tributary was 
tapped for irrigation in 
2007. Fish died by the 
thousands, and Lake 
Boga's resort-based 
economy was left high 
and dry. “We're a very 
proud little town,” says 
resident Pauline Coke. 
“We're devastated.” 





48 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


THE DROUGHT FELL ON AUSTRALIA LIKE A MALLET, DELIVERING A PSYCHIC 
BLOW FOR WHICH THE PLUCKY LAND DOWN UNDER WAS NOT PREPARED. 


century, it has been mechanized by an armada 
of weirs, locks, and barrages, so that the flows 
will be of maximum benefit to the farmers who 
depend on irrigation in the Murray-Darling 
Basin. As a result, says former commonwealth 
water minister Malcolm Turnbull, “we've got 
an unnatural environment in the river. Because 
it’s regulated, the river now runs high when 
nature would run it low, and low when nature 
would run it high” That manipulation had 
unintended consequences. Irrigation caused 
salinity levels to skyrocket, which in turn poi- 
soned wetlands and rendered large stretches of 
acreage unfit for cultivation. 

Such was the rickety state of Australia’s water 
supply even before the drought fell on it like 
a mallet, delivering a psychic blow for which 
the plucky land down under was not prepared. 
‘The crisis has pitted one state against another, 
big cities against rural areas, environmental 
managers against irrigators, and small farms 
against government-backed superfarms in a 
high-stakes competition for a shrinking com- 
modity, Well beyond the national breadbas- 
ket of the Murray-Darling Basin, every major 
urban area has faced the clampdown of water 
restrictions and the subsequent browning of its 
revered English gardens and cricket ovals. The 
trauma is particularly acute in rural bastions of 
self-reliance, like the New South Wales dairy 
community inhabited by Malcolm Adlington, 
which are fast becoming ghost towns. Whole 
crops have been wiped out by heat stress and 
low moisture, while entire growing sectors— 
rice, cotton, citrus—face collapse. 

The once quintessential Australian swagger 
has now come to resemble, in the wake of the 
water crisis, what Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth 
Kiibler-Ross famously termed the “stages of 
grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, 
acceptance. In what is shaping up to be a cau- 
tionary tale for other developed nations, the 
world’s 15th biggest economy is learning hard 
lessons about the limits of natural resources 
in an era of climate change. The upside is that 
Australians may be the ones to teach those les- 
sons to the rest of the industrialized world. 


50 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


n the Riverland district of South Australia, a 

48-year-old man drives through his citrus 

orchard on a bulldozer, mowing down 800 

of his Valencia and navel orange trees. The 
man knows what he is doing. Something must 
give. For decades the mighty Murray River 
transformed this land into a lush patchwork of 
olive, citrus, apricot, and avocado orchards, But 
now the water bureaucrats have announced that 
South Australians may use only 16 percent of 
their annual allocation. And so Mick Punturiero, 
a third-generation farmer of Italian descent, has 
made a hard choice: He elects to sacrifice his 
orange trees and reserve what water he has for 
his prized lime orchard. Underneath the roar- 
ing of the engine, Punturiero hears the cracking 
of muscular trunks he has nurtured for 20 
years. And what roils inside him is something 
darker than sorrow. 

A few weeks later two state officials come to 
Punturiero’s village of Cooltong, just outside 
Renmark, a few hours’ drive from Adelaide. 
They have an announcement to make. The 
catchment levels at Hume Dam have been 
revised, and it’s good news: The water allocation 
has been doubled, to 32 percent! The farmers in 
attendance are not overjoyed. Truthfully, with 
the drought bearing down on them, 32 percent 
of what they need is not enough to save their 
orchards. All Punturiero can think is, I could 
have kept my orange trees. 

Two months later, Punturiero is still possessed 
of operatic rage as he pours a guest some home- 
made lime juice and drops his meaty frame into 
a chair. Why has it taken them so long to rec- 
ognize this water crisis? he demands. “Let’s go 
to THEIR house! Tell them which child THEY 
have to sacrifice to save their whole family! 
Let’s put THEIR family in a pile!” 

He takes a deep breath. “I get very upset talk- 
ing about this issue,” he says. “I get very, very, 
VERY agitated over it. End of the day, what's 
been done is criminal.” As to the actual crime 
and its perpetrators, Mick Punturiero flails with 
theories. Mostly he blames government officials 
who encouraged agricultural development 
beyond sustainable levels. Even in his more 


Lettuce grower Donato 
Gargaro irrigates seed- 
lings with water from the 
Murrumbidgee River near 
Hay. About 95 percent 
water, lettuce is best 
grown in winter, when 
rain can augment irrigation 
and temperatures drop, 
reducing the water lost 
to evaporation. 


reflective moments, he does not entertain the 
notion that the problem arises from the folly of 
growing citrus on the wrong side of “the line.” 

The line is Goyder’s Line, a boundary that 
marks the limit of sufficient rainfall for crops 
to grow in South Australia. In 1865 a surveyor 
named George Goyder set out on a remarkable 
journey by horseback to trace the point where 
grassland gave way to sparse bush country. 
Australia’s settlers relied on Goyder’s Line to 
demarcate arable land from land unsuitable for 
agriculture. Except when they didn’t: Renmark, 
for instance, lay on the wrong side of Goyder’s 
Line, but that did not stop two Canadian broth- 
ers named Chaffey from developing an irriga- 
tion system in Renmark two decades after the 
surveyor'’s warning. 

As it turns out, the Chaffeys were three dec- 
ades ahead of their time. The Australian govern- 
ment inaugurated its first “soldier settlement” 
scheme after World War I, offering land, water, 
and farm machinery to veterans. In the dec- 
ades that followed, orchards and vineyards and 
wheat fields miraculously sprang up from for- 
mer scrub desert north of Goyder’s Line. Canal 
after canal was dug to deliver the Murray's water 
to the new farmland—and later, to sprawling 
irrigation districts dedicated to the nascent 
(and highly water-thirsty) rice industry. By the 
early 1970s, Australia was a major exporter of 





such crops, its farming lobby had emerged as a 
formidable political force, and the government 
was selling off water licenses to any bloke who 
fancied being his own boss and who wouldn't 
whinge when the odd drought came along. 

Mick Punturiero’s grandfather was a Calabrian 
émigré who bought his first acreage from a retir- 
ing World War II veteran, one of thousands 
more soldiers enticed by the government to 
develop the basin. The audacity of farming in 
such an arid area was not readily apparent to 
Punturiero’s grandfather, who had no education 
other than in how to grow an exquisite grape. 

Soon the Murray began to run low, and fields 
started to salt up. Unfortunately, the prescrip- 
tions only helped spread the disease. Leakproof 
irrigation technology meant that less water 
returned to the system. Salt interceptors kept 
crops from being poisoned, but only by pump- 
ing out limitless quantities of water. In 1995 
the Murray-Darling Basin Commission finally 
introduced a cap on how much water each state 
could draw from the river. But the binge didn’t 
end. Farmers who owned water rights but had 
never used them proceeded to sell their now 
coveted “sleeper licenses” to others who would. 
Industrialists were offered tax incentives to 
create superfarms and introduced vast olive and 
almond groves to the basin. 

Meanwhile, the governments of New South 


AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT 51 





Spin masters, overheated 
farm boys near Deniliquin 
put the Mulwala Canal to 
fefofolo MUI -Melale- Mellolt(e|(-t33 
summer day. The largest 
irrigation canal in the 
Murray-Darling Basin, the 
channel transports water 
from Lake Mulwala more 
than a hundred miles to 
the heart of New South 
Wales farm country. 








Wales and Queensland routinely flouted the 
extraction cap and continued to hand out 
licenses. “The increase in diversions from the 
Murray River in the late nineties was rather like 
drinkers in a bar,” says Malcolm Turnbull. “The 
barkeeper says, ‘Last orders, gentlemen.’ And 
everyone rushes in to drink as much as they can 
before they get thrown out. That’s what we were 
doing. Just as it became apparent that resources 
were overtaxed, there were more claims on it.” 
A decade ago, Mick Punturiero had grown to 
be South Australia’s biggest lime producer and 
was doing all the right things. He employed the 
latest water conservation technology. What water 
he did not need he donated back to the state for 
environmental usage. Even so, he could see where 
the increasing demands on the Murray would 
lead. He recalls warning a state official in the 
late 1990s, “You need to stop this development. 
We're poorly managing our water resources.” 
He remembers the official's words as if uttered 
yesterday: “Mick, you can’t control progress.” 
Then came the drought, which began like any 
other, in 2002. But it has not ended, and now the 
binge is over. Though dryland farmers who 
depend on rain have watched their corn and 
wheat fields dwindle into dust plains, they at least 
have been accustomed to braving parched sea- 
sons. By contrast, “irrigated farmers have always 
had water, and never in their wildest dreams did 


54 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


To water their garden, the 
Charter family of Hallett 
Cove—including parents 
Carl and Leita—shower 
together and catch the 
runoff in buckets. It’s 

one of many measures 
promoted by the state of 
South Australia that the 
family has used to cut its 
water consumption in half. 


they think somebody would turn the tap off,” says 
rural financial counselor Don Seward. But as the 
drought advanced, the allocations have plum- 
meted: 95 percent. Then 50. Then 32. And now, 
in Mick Punturiero’s case, back to 16 percent. 

“The river's no different from the highways 
every Australian pays for through his taxes,” he 
argues. “Every Australian has paid for the locks. 
We've paid for the Dartmouth Dam, which was 
supposed to drought-proof South Australia. So 
why don’t you give me my full allocation? Give 
it to me! It's rightfully mine!” 

Punturiero sees himself as the faithful care- 
taker of land that the Australian government 
gave to reward the service of young men who 
died on the sands of Gallipoli. He sees that land 
as a gold ingot that the government has turned 
into a lump of lead. He sees powerful interests 
profiting at his expense. He sees new irrigators 
downriver sucking the system dry. He also sees 
fellow farmers much like his grandfather, who 
never bothered to put a dime into savings, tum- 
bling into insolvency. Or committing suicide. 
And he understands their bottomless despair. 
He feels it himself at times—“boxed into a cor- 
ner, he says in a suddenly depleted voice, “and 
I can't defend my family no more.” 

But fury returns. Anger is all Mick Punturiero 
has at the moment. He will not go down with- 
out a fight—that he pledges: “You won't see me 


ADELAIDE MAY HAVE THE DUBIOUS DISTINCTION OF BEING THE FIRST 
INDUSTRIALIZED CITY TO LIVE IN A CONSTANT STATE OF WATER SHORTAGE. 


crawling off the farm on me hands and knees— 
not unless I see some bloody heads roll first!” 


tis hard for many Australians to reconcile the 

sputtering, surgically disfigured version of 

the Murray River with the shimmering idyll 

of their younger days. At the river's mouth, a 
flourishing ecosystem had long been nourished 
by the natural ebb and flow of seawater and fresh 
water. The ocean would rush in when the river 
ran low and then be pushed out by fresh water 
as the first hard rains drained down the Murray 
to the sea. Today the overallocation of irrigation 
water, coupled with the drought, has brought 
the river to a virtual standstill. So that the belea- 
guered Murray can meet the sea, its mouth must 
be dredged around the clock. Without dredging, 
the mouth would silt up, cutting off fresh water 
to the lagoon ecosystem called The Coorong 
and to nearby Lake Alexandrina. 

It is here, every morning, that a 65-year-old 
silver-haired fisherman in waders and a Wind- 
breaker navigates his aluminum boat out into 
the waters of Lake Alexandrina, or what is left of 
it. Long humps of silt-covered land rise up out 
of the water. Since most everyone else in his line 
of work has moved away, Henry Jones has the 
lake to himself—not counting the pelicans, 
though he, in fact, does count them, thinking: 
Maybe a tenth of what there was. And no white 
ibis. No blue-billed duck. Edging up to the north- 
ern Coorong lagoon, Jones reaches into the water 
to collect his gill nets. Among his catch there is 
not a single silver perch or Murray cod or bony 
bream. The salty water has done them in. Only 
carp survive. Dozens of carp, which did not 
even exist in the lower lakes a quarter century 
ago, and whose presence signals the demise of 
the freshwater environment. 

Jones has adapted to the changes in a way 
the vanishing species cannot. He has found 
retailers who will buy all the carp he can catch. 
And truthfully, he could adapt further. If, as is 
expected, the government constructs a weir 
near the bottom of the river to give urban 
dwellers in Adelaide more water, Lake Alexan- 
drina and its sibling Lake Albert would become 


saltwater lakes. “Personally, P'd probably be bet- 
ter off catching mullet, flounder, black bream, 
and a couple of other marine species,’ he says as 
he sits at the dining room table of the house he 
built 40 years ago. “But it’s just not right. These 
lakes have always been freshwater. It’s just a 
massive change. It’s nonsense.” 

The drought has left his community reel- 
ing. Local winemakers have recently been 
informed that the Murray River would no lon- 
ger be available for their vineyards. And Jones 
is a close friend to the elders of the Ngarrindjeri 
Aboriginal people, whose 30,000-year domain 
over the river abruptly ended when the expedi- 
tion led by Capt. Charles Sturt arrived at the 
Murray’s mouth in 1830. For the Ngarrindjeri, 
the drought has led to the disappearance of 
black swan eggs, freshwater mussels, and other 
sacred totems that are vital to their spiritual and 
physical nourishment. 

Still, in the scramble to claim a share of Aus- 
tralia’s diminishing water supply, these people 
at least have a voice. The creatures of the lakes 
and wetlands do not. “In a crisis, the entitlement 
the environment supposedly has is totally sub- 
jective to political whims,” says Murray River 
environmental manager Judy Goode, who refers 
to herself as “the manager of dead and dying 
things.” Even protected ecosystems—such as 
The Coorong and, in the northern basin, the 
Macquarie Marshes of bird-nesting legend— 
receive no special dispensation, so long as there 
is a “critical human need” to be met. 

So Henry Jones has become the de facto 
voice for the dead and dying, delivering a well- 
honed, if mournful, monologue to whoever 
will listen: All the systems are on the point of 
collapse. Two-thirds of The Coorong is already 
dead—its salinity is almost that of the Dead Sea. 
What Jones finds, as he travels around the ba- 
sin to argue that water must be allocated for 
his Coorong and his lakes, is a sentiment that 
the whole water crisis is the environmentalists’ 
fault anyway. The greenies are derided for their 
shrill sanctimony. Farmers express indignation 
that any of their precious “working river” is lost 
to the sea. They tell Jones that it makes more 


AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT 55 


IT’S UP TO AUSTRALIA TO SHOW THE REST OF THE WORLD WHAT THE NEW 
LANDSCAPE WILL BE—ONE THAT’S COME TO TERMS WITH LIMITATIONS. 


sense to divert the Murray all the way inland, 
officially consigning the river to eternal servi- 
tude as an irrigation channel, while fishermen 
buck up and learn to live off the sea. In cotton- 
growing areas wholly dependent on irrigation, 
Jones says, “I’m lucky to get out with my life” 

The Coorong represents only one glaring 
example of the Murray-Darling Basin’s imperiled 
ecosystem. For example, Australian scientists 
and government officials were caught unaware 
when farther upriver some invisible drought- 
tolerance threshold was crossed and hundreds of 
thousands of river red gum trees—in the world’s 
biggest such forest—suddenly died. And of late, 
a fresh concern has emerged: that the wetlands 
may be brewing toxins. Robbed of their seasonal 
flushing, and instead unnaturally submerged for 
decades, the swamps have become so dry that 
the crusted silt has reacted with air to form large 
surfaces of sulfuric acid. Scientists haven't fully 
gauged the threat to animals and people. For 
now, as University of Adelaide water economist 
Mike Young observes, “you wouldn't want to 
put your hand in it” 


delaide may have the dubious distinction 
of being the world’s first industrialized 
city to live in a constant state of water 
shortage. Its unhealthy reliance on the 
Murray—up to 90 percent of its water supply 
in low-rainfall periods—is symbolized by two 
unsightly pipelines that stretch more than 30 
miles from the river to the city’s water tanks. 
Since shortly after the drought’s onset in 2002, 
the South Australia capital has been on water 
restrictions. Its residents dutifully cart buckets 
of used shower and washing machine water out- 
side to their gardens. Native plants and artifi- 
cial lawns are de rigueur. The racks of hardware 
stores are crammed with soil wetters, gray water 
diverter hoses, water-restricting shower nozzles, 
four-minute shower timers, and other tributes 
to water austerity. The radio “talk-back” shows 
have become reliable outlets for ranting about 
this or that water abuser. 
Still, civic virtue is no substitute for lasting 
reform. The nation’s water crisis won't be solved 


56 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢« APRIL 2009 


by “drought-proofing” Adelaide, which, despite 
its dependence on the Murray, claims only 
6 percent of the total drain on the river. “South 
Australia’s very aware that they’re living precari- 
ously,’ says Wilderness Society environmental 
activist Peter Owen. “We're not going to save 
our river system by standing in buckets.” 

Meanwhile, outside of the Murray-Darling 
Basin, the drought has exposed serious flaws in 
the water resources of Sydney, Melbourne, and 
Brisbane, among other urban areas. The hard 
lesson of Australia’s dry run is that the coun- 
try’s jaunty boosterism no longer suffices as the 
way forward. “I work on the assumption that 
we're going to see more episodes of this type of 
drought in the future because of climate change,” 
says Malcolm Turnbull, whose Liberal Party 
leader John Howard, a longtime climate change 
skeptic, was turned out of office in November 
2007. “A prudent minister assumes it’s going to 
get hotter and drier, and plans accordingly.” 

But what does this mean, really? Will it 
mean the construction of expensive desalina- 
tion plants in Adelaide, Sydney, and elsewhere, 
with escalating energy bills? Will it be possible 
to develop drought-resistant crop varieties to 
keep food production up? Or to drastically 
reduce the water needs of dairy farmers who use 
a thousand gallons of water for each gallon of 
milk they produce? Will the Murray River's hard 
labor continue, or will it see mercy? A robust 
new landscape is required, and it’s up to Australia 
to show the rest of the industrialized world what 
that new landscape will be. For starters, it may 
be a landscape that’s come to terms with limita- 
tions. Goyder’s Line is even more relevant today, 
as drought and climate change give new urgency 
to the question of how intensively marginal 
agricultural land should be worked—or whether 
it should be left fallow. 

After all, the final stage of coping with loss is 
acceptance. Back in 1962 Frank Whelan was the 
third farmer in his New South Wales district to 
receive a water allocation to grow rice, six years 
before the town of Coleambally was incorporated. 
Until this season he always had a crop. Although 
he’s 74, his memory is as clear as his eyes. 


“It hurts,” says Frank 
Eddy, to destroy his own 
healthy peach trees, but 
the drought and reduced 
allocations have forced 
him to cull thousands of 
older trees on his orchards 
near Shepparton, Victoria. 


Droughts, market fluctuations, wrangles with 
the government, and, yes, incessant sniping by 
environmentalists that rice requires enormous 
quantities of water and therefore has no right- 
ful place on this semiarid continent—Whelan 
remembers Coleambally prospering through all 
the adversity. He remembers town gatherings 
when the news was almost always good, because 
the irrigation water was always there. 

Today the mood is different as Whelan sits 
in the local bowling hall with 200 fellow farm- 
ers. For four hours they listen as a panel of 
experts say there will be no irrigation water for 
Coleambally for the foreseeable future. They 
are suggesting new economic avenues for the 
town—things that have nothing to do with rice. 
A number of farmers voice their outrage. They 
blame the bureaucrats. They blame the environ- 
mentalists. They blame New South Wales. But 
Whelan says nothing. He just sits there, his pale 
eyes blinking, occasionally rubbing his wrinkled 
forehead with a hand that includes two fingers 
mangled by a farm equipment accident. 

He has seen this coming. With the onset of 
the drought, he compacted his soil with a pad- 
foot roller to minimize leakage. He began to cut 
off some of his acreage from water. Then still 
more acreage. All the while, the lifelong farmer 
watched as national production of rice dropped 
from more than a million tons a year to 21,000, 





contributing to the food shortage being felt 
across the globe. Australia, which has served 
as a food bowl to the world, is searching for a 
future. Whatever that future may be, Whelan 
knows the rice-growing town of Coleambally 
will never play the same role. 

And so after the meeting breaks up, a fellow 
farmer sidles up to him and asks, “Well, what 
do ya think, mate?” 

The question is one that will continue to pre- 
occupy Coleambally for some time to come. At 
one point, residents actually tossed in the towel 
and offered to sell the entire town and its water 
supply to the commonwealth for $2.4 billion. A 
few days later, they rescinded the offer, digging 
in their heels and insisting the town will remain 
a vital food provider. 

The wrangle will continue, in Coleambally and 
throughout Australia. But some have arrived, 
however reluctantly, at a point of acceptance. 
A year after the reporting for this story began, 
dairy farmer Malcolm Adlington sold off the 
rest of his cattle and now drives a minibus for 
a living. The citrus grower Mick Punturiero 
uprooted half of his orchard and acknowledges 
that he will probably be unable to continue 
farming. And on this night in Coleambally, 
Frank Whelan makes a decision as well. 

“Oh,” he replies to his fellow rice farmer with 
asad smile, “I think Pll go home and retire” 0 


AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT 57 


Scanning the horizon 
for rain is a way of life 
for the Kenny girls, 
Hannah (at left) and 
Alice. Their family have 
been dryland farmers 
of wheat near Barellan 
for three generations. 
“We will have a harvest 
this year,” says the girls’ 
mother, Julie. But just 
barely—months have 
passed without a single 
drop of rain. 





58 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢« APRIL 2009 





Outlook: 


EXTREME 


As the planet warms, 
look for more floods 
where it’s already wet 
and deeper drought 
where water is scarce. 


BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT 


The world’s first empire, known as Akkad, was 
founded some 4,300 years ago, between the 
Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. The empire was 
ruled from a city—also known as Akkad—that 
is believed to have lain just south of modern-day 
Baghdad, and its influence extended north into 
what is now Syria, west into Anatolia, and east 
into Iran. The Akkadians were well organized 
and well armed and, as a result, also wealthy: 
Texts from the time testify to the riches, from 
rare woods to precious metals, that poured into 
the capital from faraway lands. 

Then, about a century after it was founded, 
the Akkad empire suddenly collapsed. During 


60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + APRIL 2009 





one three-year period four men in succession 
briefly claimed to be emperor. “Who was king? 
Who was not king?” a register known as the 
Sumerian King List asks. 

For many years, scholars blamed the empire's 
fall on politics. But about a decade ago, climate 
scientists examining records from lake bot- 
toms and the ocean floor discovered that right 
around the time that the empire disintegrated, 
rainfall in the region dropped dramatically. 
It is now believed that Akkad’s collapse was 
caused by a devastating drought. Other civili- 
zations whose demise has recently been linked 
to shifts in rainfall include the Old Kingdom of 


Egypt, which fell right around the same time as 


d; the Tiwanacu civilization, which thrived 
near Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, for more than 
a millennium before its fields were abandoned 
around .p, 1100; and the Classic Maya civiliza- 
tion, which collapsed at the height of its devel- 
opment, around a.p. 800. 

The rainfall changes that devastated these 
early civilizations long predate industrializa- 
tion; they were triggered by naturally occurring 
climate shifts whose causes remain uncertain. 
By contrast, climate change brought about by 
increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is our 
own doing. It, too, will influence precipitation 


CHINA DAILY/REUTERS/CORBIS 


In July 2007 nine inches of rain in 24 hours turned a Chongqing stairway into a waterfall. 
At the same time in the north, more than a million people faced severe water shortages. 


patterns, in ways that, though not always easy to 
predict, could prove equally damaging. 

Warm air holds more water vapor—itself a 
greenhouse gas—so a hotter world is a world 
where the atmosphere contains more moisture. 
(For every degree Celsius that air temperatures 
increase, a given amount of air near the surface 
holds roughly 7 percent more water vapor.) This 
will not necessarily translate into more rain—in 
fact, most scientists believe that total precipitation 


Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for the New Yorker 
and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, 
Nature, and Climate Change. 


CHANGING RAINS 61 





will increase only modestly—but it is likely to 
translate into changes in where the rain falls. 
It will amplify the basic dynamics that govern 
rainfall: In certain parts of the world, moist air 
tends to rise, and in others, the moisture tends 
to drop out as rain and snow. 

“The basic argument would be that the trans- 
fers of water are going to get bigger,” explains 
Isaac Held, a scientist at the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical 
Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton Uni- 
versity. Climate models generally agree that 
over the coming century, the polar and subpolar 
regions will receive more precipitation, and the 
subtropics—the area between the tropical and 
temperate zones—will receive less. On a regional 
scale, the models disagree about some trends. 
But there is a consensus that the Mediterranean 
Basin will become more arid. So, too, will Mexico, 
the southwestern United States, South Africa, 
and southern Australia. Canada and northern 
Europe, for their part, will grow damper. 

A good general rule of thumb, Held says, is 
that “wet areas are going to get wetter, and dry 
areas drier.” Since higher temperatures lead to 
increased evaporation, even areas that continue 
to receive the same amount of overall precipita- 
tion will become more prone to drought. This 
poses a particular risk for regions that already 
subsist on minimal rainfall or that depend on 
rain-fed agriculture. 

“Tf you look at Africa, only about 6 percent of 
its cropland is irrigated,” notes Sandra Postel, an 
expert on freshwater resources and director of 
the Global Water Policy Project. “So it’s a very 
vulnerable region.” 

Meanwhile, when rain does come, it will 
likely arrive in more intense bursts, increas- 
ing the risk of flooding—even in areas that 
are drying out. A recent report by the United 
Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC) notes that “heavy precipita- 
tion events are projected to become more fre- 
quent” and that an increase in such events is 
probably already contributing to disaster. In 
the single decade between 1996 and 2005 there 
were twice as many inland flood catastrophes 


62 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 








CHANGING RAINS 


Climate models indicate that 
over the next several decades, 
increases in atmospheric carbon 
could significantly alter world- 
wide precipitation patterns. This 
map shows predictions based on 
arise in average CO, level from 
350 to 550 parts per million. 


DROUGHT AND DELUGE 


Warm air holds more moisture, carrying it away from 
dry areas (1) and toward wetter ones (2). Thus as 
global temperatures rise, dry areas will likely get drier 
and wet areas wetter. Seasonal extremes will likewise 
intensify, as moisture accumulated in the dry season 
is shed in downpours in cooler times, leading to sea- 
sonal floods in regions otherwise prone to drought. 


SPREADING DESERTS 


Atmospheric warming is also predicted to affect 
rainfall by altering global air circulation. At present, 
warm air carried from the tropics by circulation loops 
called Hadley cells meets cool polar air carried by 
Ferrel cells in zones around 30° north and south, cre- 
ating arid zones. As the planet warms, these zones are 
expected to expand and shift toward the Poles. 



















Percentage change 
from 1971-2000 average 
to 2041-2070 average 


‘SEAN MCNAUGHTON AND LISA R. RITTER (MAP), HIRAM HENRIQUEZ (GRAPHICS), ALL NG STAFF 
SOURCE: GEOPHYSICAL FLUID DYNAMICS LABORATORY, NOAA, 





as in the three decades between 1950 and 1980. 
“It happens not just spatially, but also in 
time,” says Brian Soden, a professor of marine 
and atmospheric science at the University of 
Miami. “And so the dry periods become drier, 
and the wet periods become wetter.” 
Quantifying the effects of global warming 
on rainfall patterns is challenging. Rain is what 
scientists call a “noisy” phenomenon, meaning 
that there is a great deal of natural variability 
from year to year. Experts say that it may not 
be until the middle of this century that some 
long-term changes in precipitation emerge 
from the background clatter of year-to-year 
fluctuations. But others are already discernible. 
Between 1925 and 1999, the area between 40 and 
70 degrees north latitude grew rainier, while the 
area between zero and 30 degrees north grew 
drier. In keeping with this broad trend, north- 
ern Europe seems to be growing wetter, while 
the southern part of the continent grows more 
arid. The Spanish Environment Ministry has 
estimated that, owing to the combined effects 
of climate change and poor land-use practices, 


64 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + APRIL 2009 





Drought scars the earth in Northern Darfur in October 2005. The UN calls this region 
“a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.” 


fully a third of the country is at risk of deserti- 
fication. Meanwhile, the island of Cyprus has 
become so parched that in the summer of 2008, 
with its reservoir levels at just 7 percent, it was 
forced to start shipping in water from Greece. 

“I worry,’ says Cyprus’s environment com- 
missioner, Charalambos Theopemptou. “The 
IPCC is talking about a 20 or 30 percent reduc- 
tion of rainfall in this area, which means that 
the problem is here to stay. And this combined 
with higher temperatures—I think it is going 
to make life very hard in the whole of the 
Mediterranean.” 

Other problems could follow from changes 
not so much in the amount of precipitation 
as in the type. It is estimated that more than 
a billion people—about a sixth of the world’s 
population—live in regions whose water sup- 
ply depends, at least in part, on runoff from 
glaciers or seasonal snowmelt. As the world 
warms, more precipitation will fall as rain and 
less as snow, so this storage system may break 
down. The Peruvian city of Cusco, for instance, 
relies in part on runoff from the glaciers of the 





Quelccaya ice cap to provide water in summer. 
In recent years, as the glaciers have receded 
owing to rising temperatures, Cusco has peri- 
odically had to resort to water rationing. 
Several recent reports, including a National 
Intelligence Assessment prepared for American 
policymakers in 2008, predict that over the 
next few decades, climate change will emerge 
as a significant source of political instability. (It 
was no coincidence, perhaps, that the drought- 
parched Akkad empire was governed in the 
end by a flurry of teetering monarchies.) Water 
shortages in particular are likely to create or 
exacerbate international tensions. “In some 
areas of the Middle East, tensions over water 
already exist,’ notes a study prepared by a panel 
of retired U.S. military officials. Rising tem- 
peratures may already be swelling the ranks 
of international refugees—“Climate change is 
today one of the main drivers of forced displace- 
ment,” the United Nations High Commissioner 
for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has said—and 
contributing to armed clashes. Some experts see 
a connection between the fighting in Darfur, 


LYNSEY ADDARIO (LEFT); LARRY W. SMITH, EPA/CORBIS (RIGHT) 





Neighbors in Fredonia, Kansas, helped each other salvage treasured possessions after 
flash floods, driven by days of record-breaking rainfall, saturated homes in June 2007. 


which has claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, 
and changes in rainfall in the region, bringing 
nomadic herders into conflict with farmers. 

Will the rainfall changes of the future affect 
societies as severely as some of the changes of 
the past? The American Southwest, to look at 
one example, has historically been prone to 
droughts severe enough to wipe out—or at 
least disperse—local populations. (It is believed 
that one such megadrought at the end of the 
13th century contributed to the demise of the 
Anasazi civilization, centered in what currently 
is the Four Corners.) Nowadays, of course, 
water-management techniques are a good dea 
more sophisticated than they once were, and the 
Southwest is supported by what Richard Seager, 
an expert on the climatic history of the region, 
calls “plumbing on a continental scale.’ Just how 
vulnerable is it to the aridity likely to result from 
global warming? 

“We do not know, because we have not been 
at this point before,” Seager observes. “But as 
man changes the climate, we may be about to 
find out” O 





CHANGING RAINS 65 








The rich life of Svalbard, 
Norway’s Arctic archipelago, 
faces a creeping thaw. 


Drifts of Barents Sea ice can still bear the weight of a bear, but this young male is leaping into’ a changing world 


a A 











Briinnich’s guillemots plunge into the ocean near Bjornoya 
Island to snatch schooling fish, sometimes reaching depths of 
500 feet. These stout seabirds breed here by the hundreds of 
thousands, most dispersing to Iceland or Greenland in winter. 


68 




















———— ~ So ——————— = 
= —_— = 
" 





Even a polar bear seems small against the walls of Magdalene- 
fjorden on Spitsbergen, largest of Svalbard’s islands. Glacial 


= ‘ice covers more than half the terrain of this archipelago, which 





By Bruce Barcott = Photographs by Paul Nicklen 


IVE MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT 
in Svalbard: The wild world is 
awake and clattering. At the edge 
of a sheltered estuary in the 
Adventdalen, a valley on a clus- 
ter of islands halfway between 
Norway and the North Pole, a 
flock of arctic terns soar and wheel in the perpet- 
ual daylight. They’re agitated. A pair of glaucous 
gulls—chick snatchers, egg stealers, the Arctic’s 
formidable winged predators—are approaching 
from the east. The terns put up a fierce defense. 
They flash their red beaks at the gulls and turn 
themselves into a cloud of sharpness. 

The gambit works. The gulls bypass the terns 
and circle inland, passing over a pair of ground- 
nesting eiders, a kennel of sled dogs, and a soli- 
tary reindeer feeding on the tundra. 

It’s a typical summer night in Svalbard, an 
entirely atypical refuge in the high Arctic that 
abounds with an extraordinary array of wildlife. 
Few places in the circumpolar region can match 
its biodensity. Polar bears thrive here. Roughly 
half the estimated 3,000 bears in the Barents Sea 
population raise their young on the archipelago’s 
isolated islands, and humans are warned not to 
venture beyond town without a rifle as protec- 
tion against Ursus maritimus. Seabirds migrate 
to Svalbard in the millions. Five species of seals 
and 12 kinds of whales feed in the waters off 
its coast. Atlantic walruses prosper on the rich 
clam beds along the shallow shelf of the Barents 
Sea. On the open tundra of Svalbard’s plateaus 
and valleys, reindeer forage and arctic fox hunt 
free from predators. 

To the human eye, the terrain is stark, aus- 
tere, unforgiving. More than half the landmass 
is encased in glacial ice. Less than 10 percent 
offers enough light and soil to support vegeta- 
tion. On a summer climb up the rocky slopes 
of Nordenskiéldfjellet (Mount Nordenskiéld), 
I counted only seven different plant species in 
five hours—and those clung to a tenuous exis- 
tence, hunkering between sheltering plates of 
broken rock like hermits in a desert. 

Years ago when Norwegian archaeologist 
Pov] Simonsen considered the limits of human 


74 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


survival in the far north, he spoke of the “edge 
of the possible.’ For most of its history, Svalbard 
has existed beyond that edge. Ancient civiliza- 
tion never got a toehold here. The Vikings didn't 
colonize it. The Inuit stayed away. Even today, 
as tourists enjoy daily air service from Oslo, just 
2,500 people live here year-round, many work- 
ing in Svalbard’s coal mines. Winter brings per- 
petual darkness. 

But for a select number of species, Sval- 
bard acts as an extraordinary cradle of life. 
And the secret to the place isn’t bound up in 
the land. Svalbard is ruled by water, light, and 
temperature. 

Up here the biotic machine is fueled by the 
Gulf Stream, which sweeps up the East Coast of 
the United States. If you rode the Gulf Stream’s 
main branch, the North Atlantic Current, all 
the way north, you’d end up in the West Spits- 
bergen Current off the coast of Svalbard. There 
the warm, salty current (though at 42°F, “warm” 
is a relative term) keeps the water mostly ice 
free and nurtures massive plankton blooms 
every spring. The plankton lure whales and 
great schools of capelin and polar cod, which 
provide food for seabirds and seals. The abun- 
dance of seals, in turn, keeps Svalbard’s polar 
bears fed. Adult bears consume a huge amount 
of seal blubber, primarily from ringed seals and 
bearded seals. That food produces the energy 
necessary to keep the bears’ massive bodies 
(males commonly weigh up to 1,300 pounds, 
females about half that) moving over a home 
range that can vary from 60 square miles up 
to 144,000. 

The energy-rich waters off the coast also 
draw an annual infusion of seabirds. Every May 
and June, when the ice retreats and the tundra 
clears of snow, upwards of three million birds 
flock to Svalbard. They’re vast in number but 
not variety. Only about 28 species are consid- 
ered common or abundant, and only one—the 
Svalbard rock ptarmigan—has what it takes to 
survive on land year-round. The birds migrate 
up here for the safe breeding and the nonstop 
feasting. A quirk of geology makes the whole 
thing work. In places, Svalbard’s coastline rises 





Inspecting a human interloper, this female polar bear noses into photographer Paul Nicklen’s cabin 
after munching on his snowmobile seat, his camera bag, and his hat. The icy strip of land just outside 
was a “bear superhighway,” Nicklen recalls. “They’d come hungry, looking for food.” 


from the sea in near-vertical cliffs. They’re not 
sheer walls like Yosemite's E] Capitan, though. 
‘The cliffs contain millions of rock outcroppings 
wide enough to support a nest but often too pre- 
carious for predators like the arctic fox. 

It's a perfect breeding setup. Pairs of fulmars 





Briinnich’s guillemots, and black-legged kitti- 
wakes, sometimes intermingled on the same cliff, 
will claim a ledge for the season and raise their 
chicks on seafood caught just off the balcony, 
available 24 hours a day in the nightless summer. 
When the birds take over a cliff, the transfor- 
mation can be profound. Once, while riding a 
former fishing trawler around an inner Spits- 
bergen fjord, I looked up to see a light dusting 








Bruce Barco ory about the European bee-eater 
appeared in the October 2008 issue. Canadian-born 
Paul Nicklen is a frequent contributor to the magazine. 


of snow on a tombstone-gray sea cliff. Glass- 
ing the scene with my binoculars, I realized I 
wasn't seeing snow at all. It was the blending of 
tens of thousands of kittiwakes nesting on cliff 
ledges, their white heads creating a pointillist 
effect from miles away. 

As impressive as Svalbard’s summer birds are, 
they’re sort of nature’s carpetbaggers: here for 
the good times, gone for the bad. Come Sep- 
tember, most will be winging south. It’s hard not 
to reserve your highest respect for Svalbard’s 
year-round residents, each of which seems to 
employ one of two common strategies to sur- 
vive the brutal Arctic winter: Keep hunting or 
cache extra energy. 

The master practitioner of the first tactic is 
the polar bear, of course, which spends much 
of the winter hanging out around seal breathing 
holes, waiting for dinner to surface. The arctic 





SVALBARD 75 









/ 


Fuglehuken 
a] 


Average extent 
of March sea ice 


1979-1988 


1989-1998 —————, 


1999-2008 
Sea-ice extent 


eerenburg- 


fiorden 


Kongsfjorden 





encompasses areas 
with ice cover of 
15 percent or more. 


Omi 20 
km 20 


VIRGINIA W._ , 
‘SOURCE: NO} 


NG STAFF 


JEGIAN POLAR INSTITUTE 













Wijdefjorden 


,.. Liefdefjorden 


Sea-ice extent 
March 2008 





% 


ARCTIC OCEAN 


SJUOYANE** » 
, 


NORDA LANDET 
ws x 


EBBING ICE 

From March 1979 to March 
2008 the average ice area in 
the Barents Sea declined by 
nearly 30 percent, though 
annual ice cover has varied 
widely. In 2007 and 2008 
the sea-ice extent dipped 

to the lowest on record. 






BJORNOYA 





“Uh ws 


/ 


/ HOPEN 


Kongsoya 


Barents 


Sea 


KVI TOYA 





fox employs a hybrid strategy. It keeps hunting 
in white fur camouflage but when times get 
tough, digs into caches of food lardered months 
earlier. In more temperate regions the fox’s rep- 
utation for surplus killing—going postal in the 
chicken coop, killing far more birds than it can 
eat—has earned it the enmity of farmers, but up 
here storing those surplus kills often means the 
difference between life and death. 

For both reindeer and rock ptarmigan, cach- 
ing extra energy means one thing: fattening up. 
To watch a reindeer feed at midnight in Sval- 
bard is to witness an extraordinary event. The 
reindeer here, like the ptarmigan, let go of the 
nocturnal rhythms that govern the lives of most 
animals. They eat and eat and eat, then rest a lit- 
tle, then eat some more, regardless of the time of 
day. The reindeer build up a layer of blubberish 
fat as thick as four inches. When food grows 
scarce in winter, the fat acts as the reindeer’s 
energy reserve. 

Svalbard’s wild survivors have figured out 
how to adapt to the high Arctic’s darkness, its 
bitter cold, and its meager vegetation. But there's 
one force that has come at them too fast for evo- 
lutionary change: humans. 

From the 17th to 19th centuries, whalers 
sailed to Svalbard to hunt the region’s mighty 
cetaceans, whose thick blubber could be turned 
into whale oil and, ultimately, handsome profits. 
On a voyage to Svalbard in 1612, the captain of 
a Dutch ship reported that the Barents Sea was 
so full of whales that the ship's prow parted the 
beasts as though it were cutting through pack 
ice. By the end of the 18th century, the world’s 
insatiable appetite for whale oil had almost wiped 
them out. Some 50,000 bowhead whales, the 
longest lived mammal on the planet, were taken 
by Dutch vessels alone. The commercial carnage 
drove the species to near extinction. (Today 
more than 10,000 bowheads survive, mostly in 
the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas.) After 
mowing through the whales, the hunters turned 
their attention to the walrus—for its ivory—and 
nearly snuffed out that species too. 

At the end of World War I the Svalbard Treaty 
gave Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, 


whose resources Sweden and Russia also eyed. 
The treaty proved to be a turning point. Over 
the course of the 20th century Norwegian offi- 
cials put a halt to the free-for-all and turned one 
of the world’s greatest wildlife killing grounds 
into one of its most protected sanctuaries. 
Today 65 percent of Svalbard’s islands and 75 
percent of its marine areas lie within national 
parks or nature reserves. A remarkable thing 
happens when you give animals habitat and 
peace. They thrive. Svalbard’s walrus popula- 
tion, winnowed to a few hundred animals by the 
1950s, rebounded to more than 2,600 in 2006. 
Only a thousand reindeer grazed in the valleys 
in the 1920s. Today some experts believe there 
may be as many as 10,000. 

The days of outright slaughter are gone, but 
humans continue to pressure wildlife here in 
indirect ways. Toxins like PCBs and perfluori- 
nated compounds swirl up to Svalbard on air 
and ocean currents and become trapped in the 
fatty tissue of glaucous gulls, great skuas, arc- 
tic foxes, and ringed seals, compromising their 
immune systems. Polar bears carry much higher 
levels of the pollutants than their Alaskan and 
Canadian counterparts. Climate change, mean- 
while, forces a retreat of the summer ice pack, 
imperiling the region's polar bears. The wildlife 
that thrives up here has adapted to one of the 
toughest habitats on Earth. As temperatures 
rise, those birds, fish, and mammals will be 
forced to adapt even further. 

Perhaps there is cause for hope in the curious 
ways Svalbard’s wildlife has already adjusted to 
humans, the predator turned protector. In the 
coal-mining outpost of Barentsburg, dozens of 
black-legged kittiwakes have turned abandoned 
buildings into makeshift bird cliffs, nesting on 
the window ledges. At midnight or noon—it 
makes no difference to the birds—the parents 
leap off the ledges to dive after fish schooling 
in the harbor below. In their own small way 
the kittiwakes are expanding the edge of the 
possible, windowsill by windowsill. It’s inge- 
nious but, for Svalbard, not atypical. Up here 
opportunity and abundance often appear in 
unlikely places. 0 


SVALBARD 77 











Svalbard’s ecosystem links sky, sea, and shore. Dovekies 
(above) dive for copepods and nest on rocky slopes. The guano 
and carcasses that the flocks deposit on land fertilize a mossy 
garden, ideal lurking ground for the arctic fox. This hunter preys 
on puffins (top right) and other birds and eggs to feed her 
pups. In winter she scours snowy terrain for scraps. Nutrients 
also wash off the shore and drop from the sky into the ocean, 
nourishing vibrant anemones and soft corals (bottom right). 


80 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + APRIL 2009 





SVALBARD 81 


Overturned by waves, a chunk of glacial ice yields to the sea. 
Vikings may have found these far-flung islands as early as the 
12th century. Whalers, scientists, and Arctic explorers have 
used them as a base. But only 2,500 people call Svalbard home. 











84 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « APRIL 2009 





Svalbard supports about half the 3,000 polar bears in the 
Barents Sea region. But the Arctic’s iconic mammal isn’t the 
only one married to the ice. Another is the bearded seal, often 
a meal for a hungry bear (bottom left). The seal depends on 
ice platforms (above) for birthing, but sea ice is shrinking as 
temperatures rise. Warming waters also alter food stocks and 
distribution, and may wipe out some of the seal’s own prey. 


SVALBARD 85 








ENTTOVOONTOOQUN CLOT TOOT COO LU OAD CLONON LORD COOTQOOT PaO ON TON COORD CLOT TOOT POO TON TOOT CONT) COO TOOT Pd OD (Lon 


THE 


What motivated Hatshepsut to rule ancient Egypt 


KING 


as a man while her stepson stood in the shadows? 


HER 


Her mummy, and her true story, have come to light. 


SELE 


BY CHIP BROWN | PHOTOGRAPHS BY KENNETH GARRETT 


PU Oe ce oe 


ITUATATUTONUATOAOVONUATAANUONUATA OT ONUAUA OT ONOWNT OT OTOAUN NT OTONUNINTOTUNUNONTATONOVONUAT ECON ONUAOAOVONUATONOTONUATOAOTONUATO OT OVONUN OT OTUNUN NTOVOVNN NTOTONUN NT OTOVOV ORTON OV OTONTATOAOTOVUATO i 


ITTOATUATOATOATOATORTOATOATOATOATOATOATORTOAOATAATOATOATAATOATOATRITOITOATAATOATOATOUAITOATROOURAOOUUONOAONCOITRCON COW 0M 


Util 
=| 


= 


a 
oo 








A grand expression of royal power, Hatshepsut’s 


mortuary temple rises against a desert bluff at 
Deir el Bahri. Reliefs in the porticoes record the 
greatest triumphs of her 21-year reign. 











PTTL LE 


bitte 


Reve wen — 
Libeetetay 
te SES 





Bo a 
Wal v SS 
ANAL, ¥ 


we 


a aernte rom 
1 ANYWS 
4 NGS Ret | 





i iy ‘ ue 


Po AVY 


» Gig oy 
4 ¢ at Deir el Bahri, men carry a myrrh’ my 
y identified. Hatshepsut sent a trading 
on down the Red Sea to procitre luxuries 





MOTO de 


here was something strangely 

touching about her fingertips. 

Everywhere else about her per- 

son all human grace had van- 

ished. The raveled linen around 
her neck looked like a fashion statement gone 
horribly awry. Her mouth, with the upper lip 
shelved over the lower, was a gruesome crimp. 
(She came from a famous lineage of overbites.) 
Her eye sockets were packed with blind black 
resin, her nostrils unbecomingly plugged with 
tight rolls of cloth. Her left ear had sunk into the 
flesh on the side of her skull, and her head was 
almost completely without hair. 

I leaned toward the open display case in 
Cairo’s Egyptian Museum and gazed at what in 
all likelihood is the body of the female pharaoh 
Hatshepsut, the extraordinary woman who ruled 
Egypt from 1479 to 1458 B.c. and is famous to- 
day less for her reign during the golden age of 
Egypt's 18th dynasty than for having the audacity 
to portray herself as a man. There was no beguil- 
ing myrrh perfume in the air, only some sharp 
and sour smell that seemed minted during the 


94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





IYOJULY LATALPA 


many centuries she had spent in a limestone cave. 
It was hard to square this prostrate thing with the 
great ruler who lived so long ago and of whom it 
was written, “To look upon her was more beau- 
tiful than anything.” The only human touch was 
in the bone shine of her nailless fingertips where 
the mummified flesh had shrunk back, creating 
the illusion of a manicure and evoking not just 
our primordial vanity but our tenuous intima- 
cies, our brief and passing feel for the world. 

The discovery of Hatshepsut’s lost mummy 
made headlines two summers ago, but the full 
story unfolded slowly, in increments, a forensic 
drama more along the lines of CSI than Raid- 
ers of the Lost Ark. Indeed the search for Hat- 
shepsut showed the extent to which the trowels 
and brushes of archaeology’s traditional toolbox 
have been supplemented by CT scanners and 
DNA gradient thermocyclers. 

In 1903 the renowned archaeologist Howard 
Carter had found Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus in 
the 20th tomb discovered in the Valley of the 
Kings—KV20. The sarcophagus, one of three 
Hatshepsut had prepared, was empty. Scholars 


Hatshepsut came to adopt the clas 
“lees At left, she wears the ro: 
the pharaoh, yet softly rounded 

chin subtly suggest her 
23 ( above), she displays 








EARLY. 
DYNASTIC 
PERIOD 


ca 2950 B.C. 


LATE 
PREDYNASTIC 
PERIOD 


KINGDOM 





fia BC. 


Djoser Khufu 


Aha (Menes) 


WOMEN WHO RULED AS KINGS 

A pharaoh was meant to be both man and god, 
but a few women broke with that tradition. Only 
Hatshepsut enjoyed a long, prosperous reign, 
taking her place among notable male pharaohs. 


Female pharaohs in red 


did not know where her mummy was or whether 
it had even survived the campaign to eradicate 
the record of her rule during the reign of her co- 
regent and ultimate successor, Thutmose III, 
when almost all the images of her as king were 
systematically chiseled off temples, monuments, 
and obelisks. The search that seems to have 
finally solved the mystery was launched in 2005 
by Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Mummy 
Project and secretary general of the Supreme 
Council of Antiquities. Hawass and a team of 
scientists zeroed in on a mummy they called 
KV60a, which had been discovered more than a 
century earlier but wasn’t thought significant 
enough to remove from the floor of a minor 
tomb in the Valley of the Kings. KV60a had been 
cruising eternity without even the hospitality of 
a coffin, much less a retinue of figurines to per- 
form royal chores. She had nothing to wear, 
either—no headdress, no jewelry, no gold sandals 
or gold toe and finger coverings, none of the trea- 
sures that had been provided the pharaoh Tut- 
ankhamun, who was a pip-squeak of a king 
compared with Hatshepsut. 

And even with all the high-tech methods 
used to crack one of Egypt's most notable miss- 
ing person cases, if it had not been for the ser- 
endipitous discovery of a tooth, KV60a might 





Chip Brown has written two books as well as articles 
for more than 30 national magazines. Kenneth 
Garrett's photographs of Nubian pharaohs appeared 
in the February 2008 issue. 


96 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢ APRIL 2009 


FIRST MIDDLE SECOND 
INTERMEDIATE KINGDOM INTERMEDIATE 
PERIOD PERIOD 


ca 2125BC |ca 1975 BC. ca 1630 BC. 


Mentuhotep Il Senusret II Sobeknefru 
ca 1760 B.C. —1755 BC. 


ae 
ca 2175 BC, 


still be lying alone in the dark, her royal name 
and status unacknowledged. Today she is en- 
shrined in one of the two Royal Mummy Rooms 
at the Egyptian Museum, with plaques in Ara- 
bic and English proclaiming her to be Hatshep- 
sut, the King Herself, reunited at long last with 
her extended family of fellow New Kingdom 
pharaohs. 


iven the oblivion that befell Hatshep- 
sut, it’s hard to think of a pharaoh 
whose hopes of being remembered are 
more poignant. She seems to have been more 
afraid of anonymity than of death. She was one 
of the greatest builders in one of the greatest 
Egyptian dynasties. She raised and renovated 
temples and shrines from the Sinai to Nubia. 
The four granite obelisks she erected at the vast 
temple of the great god Amun at Karnak were 
among the most magnificent ever constructed. 
She commissioned hundreds of statues of her- 
self and left accounts in stone of her lineage, 
her titles, her history, both real and concocted, 
even her thoughts and hopes, which at times she 
confided with uncommon candor. Expressions 
of worry Hatshepsut inscribed on one of her 
obelisks at Karnak still resonate with an almost 
charming insecurity: “Now my heart turns this 
way and that, as I think what the people will say. 
Those who see my monuments in years to come, 
and who shall speak of what I have done.” 
Many uncertainties plague the early history 
of the New Kingdom, but it’s clear that when 


NEW THIRD INTERMEDIATE 
KINGDOM PERIOD 
ica 1539 BC. a 1075 BC. 


| 
| Ramses II 
Tutankhamun Tawosret 


ca 1198 BC.—1190 BC. 


HATSHEPSUT 
ca 1479 B.C,- 1473 BC. 
Regent for Thutmose III 


ca 1473 BC. - 1458 BC. 
Pharaoh and co-ruler 
with Thutmose Ill 


Royal cartouche 
of the pharaoh 
Hatshepsut 


HATSHEPSUT’S FAMILY TREE 

The female pharaoh’s mother, Ahmose, is believed to 
have been a king's daughter, which gave Hatshepsut a 
unique advantage. Her father, Thutmose |, had no royal 
blood. Hatshepsut may have used her status to seize 
power after her stepson inherited the throne. 


Sitkamose no Ahmose Ahmose- 
: Nefertari 





Other siblings; 


[ Amenhotep 1 ( Ahmose- 
Meryetamut 


Mutnofret ———={ Thutmose | |-—— Ahmose 








Other siblings 





Isis 7 Thutmose ‘sg HATSHEPSUT | 
Neferure 
ie mM a Meryetre 


Hatshepsut 


[ Araestictos tl ] 


Scholatly interpretations of royal lineages differ 





NG ART 
| Pharaoh Fe Spouse | sources: ZAHI HAWASS, SUPREME 
‘COUNCIL OF ANTIQUITIES (TIME LINE): 
: HATSHEPSUT: FROM QUEEN TO PHARAOH, 
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 
Child (FAMILY TREE) 





LATE GRECO-ROMAN PERIOD 
PERIOD CA 332 BC -A.0. 395 


332 Bc. 








Taharga Cleopatra Vil 
(ruled as a queen) 


Hatshepsut was born, Egyptian power was 
waxing. Her possible grandfather Ahmose, 
founder of the 18th dynasty, had driven out the 
formidable Hyksos invaders who had occupied 
the northern part of the Nile Valley for two 
centuries. When Ahmose’s son Amenhotep I 
did not produce a son who lived to succeed him, 
a redoubtable general known as Thutmose is be- 
lieved to have been brought into the royal line 
since he had married a princess. 

Hatshepsut was the oldest daughter of Thut- 
mose and his Great Royal Wife, Queen Ahmose, 
likely a close relative of King Ahmose. But Thut- 
mose also had a son by another queen, and this 
son, Thutmose II, inherited the crown when his 
father “rested from life.” Adhering to a common 
method of fortifying the royal lineage—and with 
none of our modern-day qualms about sleeping 
with your sister—Thutmose II and Hatshepsut 
married. They produced one daughter; a minor 
wife, Isis, would give Thutmose the male heir 
that Hatshepsut was unable to provide. 

Thutmose II did not rule for long, and when 
he was ushered into the afterlife by what CT 
scans 3,500 years later would suggest was heart 
disease, his heir, Thutmose III, was still a young 
boy. In time-honored fashion, Hatshepsut as- 
sumed effective control as the young pharaoh’s 
queen regent. 

So began one of the most intriguing periods 
of ancient Egyptian history. 

At first, Hatshepsut acted on her stepson’s 
behalf, careful to respect the conventions under 


HATSHEPSUT 97 











which previous queens had handled political 
affairs while juvenile offspring learned the 
ropes. But before long, signs emerged that 
Hatshepsut’s regency would be different. Early 
reliefs show her performing kingly func- 
tions such as making offerings to the gods and 
ordering up obelisks from red granite quarries 
at Aswan. After just a few years she had assumed 
the role of “king” of Egypt, supreme power in 
the land. Her stepson—who by then may have 
been fully capable of assuming the throne—was 
relegated to second-in-command. Hatshepsut 
proceeded to rule for a total of 21 years. 

What induced Hatshepsut to break so radi- 
cally with the traditional role of queen regent? 
A social or military crisis? Dynastic politics? 


98 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢ APRIL 2009 


Firmly gripping the reins of power, 
Hatshepsut relegated her stepson, 
Thutmose III (left), to a supporting 
role. Reliefs on the walls of the Red 
Chapel at Karnak (right) hint at 
the unusual nature of this arrange- 
ment. In a festival scene (above) 
she stands in front of him, but both 
are dressed as pharaohs, and the 
titles above them read as if they 
were one person. 


MUATUCULOATATACOLOLATRCOLORUATRCOTOTUATRCOLOMHTACOLORHATRCOLOTHATROOTD: 


Divine injunctions from Amun? A thirst for pow- 
er? “There was something impelling Hatshepsut 
to change the way she portrayed herself on public 
monuments, but we don’t know what it is,’ says 
Peter Dorman, a noted Egyptologist and presi- 
dent of the American University of Beirut. “One 
of the hardest things to guess is her motive” 
Bloodlines may have had something to do 
with it. On a cenotaph at the sandstone quarries 
of Gebel el Silsila, her chief steward and architect 
Senenmut refers to her as “the king’s firstborn 
daughter,’ a distinction that accents her lineage 
as the senior heir of Thutmose I rather than as 
the chief royal wife of Thutmose II. Remember, 
Hatshepsut was a true blue blood, related to the 
pharaoh Ahmose, while her husband-brother 
















was the offspring of an adopted king. The Egyp- 
tians believed in the divinity of the pharaoh; only 
Hatshepsut, not her stepson, had a biological link 
to divine royalty. 

Still, there was the small matter of gender, 
The kingship was meant to be passed down 
from father to son, not daughter; religious 
belief dictated that the king’s role could not be 
adequately carried out by a woman. Getting 
over this hurdle must have taken great shrewd- 
ness from the female king. When her husband 
died, Hatshepsut’s preferred title was not King’s 
Wife, but God’s Wife of Amun, a designation 
some believe paved her way to the throne. 

Hatshepsut never made a secret of her sex 
in texts; her inscriptions frequently employed 





feminine endings. But in the early going, she 
seemed to be looking for ways to synthesize 
the images of queen and king, as if a visual 
compromise might resolve the paradox of a 
female sovereign. In one seated red granite statue, 
Hatshepsut is shown with the unmistakable body 
ofa woman but with the striped memes headdress 
and uraeus cobra, symbols of a king. In some 
temple reliefs, Hatshepsut is dressed in a tradi- 
tional restrictive ankle-length gown but with her 
feet wide apart in the striding pose of the king, 
As the years went on, she seems to have 
decided it was easier to sidestep the issue of 





Society Grant Research for this project was funded 
in part by your Society membership. 


HATSHEPSUT 99 


GLORIES OF 
HER REIGN 


In the wake of the campaigns fought by 
her predecessors at the dawn of the 
New Kingdom, Hatshepsut ushered in 

a time of peace and recovery. By her 
command, temples damaged during the 
earlier conflicts were restored, new ones 
were built, and obelisks were quarried in 
Aswan. With lucrative trade contacts 
reestablished, Egypt once again received 
timber from Lebanon, turquoise from 
mines in the Sinai, and a wealth of 
luxuries (right) from the land of Punt. 


A high priest of 


- the god Amun 
Mediterranean Sea wears a distinc- 











El Ashmuneins SP¢0s Artemidos 


# Hatnub alabaster 
quarries 





Western 
Desert Valley of the Kings 
Deir el Bahri 
Medinet Habu| {7 Bebss 


Anmant (Luxor) 


Gebel el Silsila 


EXTENT OF i sandstone quarries 


MAIN MAP 


ihebes = 
onal, Aswan granite 
sic Hlephantine | aries 


LEGACY IN STONE 
sraudngste Hatshepsut erate 
Historical shoreline wd 

and drainage shown: along the Nile and 
present-day boundaries in the Sinai but 
and place-names ingray focused on her 
Omi 50 capital at Thebes, 
Okm 50 today the ruins of 
Karnak and Luxor. 





tive leopard skin. 










A royal scribe 
records each 
Offering as it is 
presented. 


tt 


att 


THE Rik 





| PUNT t 
{ Early in her rule as king, 4 
4 Hatshepsut sent trading ships 5 
to Punt, a land somewhere 
| “ along Africa’s Red Sea coast. \ 
When the ships returned, 
priests at Karnak presented a 

















- 7 dazzling array of goods to the 

WF pharaoh, who dedicated it all 

y to Amun, her patron god. 
Hatshepsut wears Thutmose Ill stands next 
the nemesheadcioth to Hatshepsut, the proper 


with its sacred cobra. place of a co-ruler on 
official occasions. 





; The pharaoh Pharaonic 
‘g waves a sekhem regalia 

y 1 scepter over Ps includes a 

> the offerings. 


false beard. 


Imports from Punt: 
include circular 

gold ingots (right), 
spices, tusks, ebony, 
myrrh trees for 
incense, panther 
skins, and live 
baboons, 


> 


“t -—" FERNANDO G. BAPTISTA AND. 
AMANDA HOBBS, NG STAFF 
‘SOURCE. W. RAYMOND JOHNSON, 
ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
MAP: CHARLES BERRY 


gender altogether. She had herself depicted 
solely as a male king, in the pharaoh's headdress, 
the pharaoh’s shendyt kilt, and the pharaoh’s 
false beard—without any female traits. Many of 
her statues, images, and texts seem part of a 
carefully calibrated media campaign to bolster 
the legitimacy of her reign as king—and ratio- 
nalize her transgression. In reliefs at Hatshep- 
sut’s mortuary temple, she spun a fable of her 
accession as the fulfillment of a divine plan and 
declared that her father, Thutmose I, not only 
intended her to be king but also was able to at- 
tend her coronation. In the panels the great god 
Amun is shown appearing before Hatshepsut’s 
mother disguised as Thutmose I. He commands 
Khnum, the ram-headed god of creation who 
models the clay of mankind on his potter’s 
wheel: “Go, to fashion her better than all gods; 
shape for me, this my daughter, whom I have 
begotten” 

Unlike most contractors, Khnum gets right to 
work, replying: “Her form shall be more exalted 
than the gods, in her great dignity of King....” 

On Khnum’s potter’s wheel, little Hatshepsut 
is depicted unmistakably as a boy. 

Exactly who was the intended audience for 
such propaganda is still disputed. It’s hard to 
imagine Hatshepsut needed to shore up her 
legitimacy with powerful allies like the high 
priests of Amun or members of the elite such 
as Senenmut. Who, then, was she pitching 
her story to? The gods? The future? National 
Geographic? 

One answer may be found in Hatshepsut's ref- 
erences to the lapwing, a common Nile marsh 
bird known to ancient Egyptians as rekhyt. In 
hieroglyphic texts the word “rekhyt” is usually 
translated as “the common people.” It occurs 
frequently in New Kingdom inscriptions, but a 
few years ago Kenneth Griffin, now at Swansea 
University in Wales, noticed that Hatshepsut 
made greater use of the phrase than other 18th- 
dynasty pharaohs. “Her inscriptions seemed 
to show a personal association with the rekhyt 
which at this stage is unrivaled,’ he says. Hat- 
shepsut often spoke possessively of “my rekhyt” 
and asked for the approval of the rekhyt—as if 





102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





HER STATUES WERE SMASHED AND THROWN 
INTO A PIT IN FRONT OF HER TEMPLE. 


A craggy bay in the Western Desert embraces 
Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple. Behind its 
crowning ridge lies the great rift now known as 
the Valley of the Kings, the royal cemetery that 
holds the entrance to her tomb. Her father was 
likely the first pharaoh to prepare his final resting 
place in the valley, launching a tradition that 
would last for more than four centuries. 


HATSHEPSUT 103 








Hatshepsut’s wet nurse 


the unusual ruler were a closet populist. When 
Hatshepsut’s heart flutters this way and that as 
she wonders what “the people” will say, the peo- 
ple she may have had in mind were the ones as 
common as lapwings on the Nile, the rekhyt. 

After her death, around 1458 b.c., her step- 
son went on to secure his destiny as one of the 
great pharaohs in Egyptian history. Thutmose III 
was a monument maker like his stepmother but 
also a warrior without peer, the so-called Napo- 
leon of ancient Egypt. In a 19-year span he led 
17 military campaigns in the Levant, including 
a victory against the Canaanites at Megiddo in 
present-day Israel that is still taught in military 
academies. He had a flock of wives, one of whom 
bore his successor, Amenhotep II. Thutmose III 
also found time to introduce the chicken to the 
Egyptian dinner table. 

In the latter part of his life, when other men 
might be content to reminisce about bygone ad- 
ventures, Thutmose III appears to have taken up 


104 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


another pastime. He decided to methodically 
wipe his stepmother, the king, out of history. 


hen Zahi Hawass set out to find Her 

Majesty King Hatshepsut, he was 

fairly certain of one thing: The naked 
mummy found resting on the floor of a minor 
tomb was not her. “When I started searching for 
Hatshepsut, I never thought I would discover 
that she was this mummy,’ Hawass says. For 
starters, she had no apparent regal bearing; 
she was fat, and as Hawass wrote in an article 
published in the journal KMT, she had “huge 
pendulous breasts” of the sort more likely to be 
found on Hatshepsut's wet nurse. 

Months earlier Hawass had visited Hatshep- 
sut’s tomb, KV20, to search for clues to her 
whereabouts. Wearing his trademark fedora, 
Hawass lowered himself 700 feet into one of the 
most dangerous tombs in the Valley of the Kings. 
The tunnel through friable shale and limestone 


U1} 


lull 





IOTLOWT VAN TOO TN Pay TOMTOM Cad LOR Can LOTT UaN COO TT Td OO Td OO 


MLATACOLORTATOAULARTATACULORLATRCOLOTATRCOLORLATRCOLOMUATA COTATI CO LOTEATL 





Where was Hatshepsut’s mummy? 
A century ago, two unidentified 
females (left) were discovered in a 
minor tomb, likely moved there by 
priests intent on hiding them from 
thieves. When recent tests revealed 


that a tooth found inside a box with 
Hatshepsut’s name (right) exactly 
matched a gap in the fatter mum- 
my’s jaw (above), the mystery of the 
lost pharaoh appeared to be solved. 


reeked of bat droppings. When Howard Carter 
cleared it in 1903, he called it “one of the most 
irksome pieces of work I ever supervised.” In the 
tomb Carter found two sarcophagi bearing Hat- 
shepsut’s name, some limestone wall panels, and 
a canopic chest, but no mummy. 

Carter made another discovery in a tomb 
close by—tomb KV60, a minor structure whose 
entrance was cut into the corridor entrance of 
KV19. In KV60 Carter found “two much de- 
nuded mummies of women and some mum- 
mified geese.” One mummy was in a coffin, the 
other on the floor. Carter took the geese and 
closed the tomb. Three years later another ar- 
chaeologist removed the mummy in the cof- 
fin to the Egyptian Museum. The inscription 
on the coffin was later linked to Hatshepsut's 
nurse. The mummy on the floor was left as she 
was, as she had been since being stashed there, 
probably by priests during the reburials of the 
21st dynasty, around 1000 B.c. 


BRANDO QUILICI, AGENTUR FOCUS (X-RAY, ABOVE) 





Over the years Egyptologists lost track of the 
entrance to KV60, and the mummy on the tomb 
floor effectively disappeared. That changed in 
June 1989, when Donald Ryan, an Egyptologist 
and lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University in 
Tacoma, Washington, came to explore several 
small, undecorated tombs in the valley. Prompted 
by the influential Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas, 
who suspected that KV60 might house Hat- 
shepsut’s mummy, Ryan had included it on his 
application for a research permit. Arriving too 
late his first day to start work, Ryan decided to 
stroll around the site to drop off some tools. He 
wandered over to the entrance of KV19 and for 
the heck of it, thinking KV60 might be nearby, 
started sweeping the entranceway with his 
broom. He worked backward from the door of 
KV19. Within half an hour he'd found a crack 
in the rock corridor. A stone hatch revealed a 
set of stairs. A week later, with Beethoven's 
Pathétique Sonata playing on a tape deck, he 


HATSHEPSUT 105 


and a local antiquities inspector entered the 
“lost” tomb. 

“Tt was spooky,’ he recalls. “I had never found 
a mummy before. The inspector and I walked in 
very carefully, There was a woman lying on the 
floor. Oh my gosh!” 

The mummy was lying in a tomb that had 
been trashed in ancient times by robbers. Her 
left arm was crooked across her chest in a buri- 
al pose some believe to be common to 18th- 
dynasty Egyptian queens. Ryan set about catalog- 
ing what he found. “We found the smashed-up 
face piece of a coffin and flecks of gold that had 
been scraped off,” he recalls. “We didn’t know 
how much had been moved around by Howard 
Carter, so we documented it as an intact site.” In 
a side chamber Ryan found a huge pile of wrap- 
pings, a mummified cow’s leg, and a stacked 
pile of “victual mummies,” wrapped bundles 
of food laid up for the deceased’s long journey 
through eternity. 

The more Ryan studied the mummy, the 
more he thought she might be someone impor- 
tant. “She was extraordinarily well mummified,” 
he says. “And she was striking a royal pose. I 
thought, Why, she’s a queen! Could it be Hat- 
shepsut? Possibly. But there was nothing to link 
the mummy to any specific individual.” 

Still, it didn’t seem right to leave whoever 
she was lying naked on the floor in a mess of 
rags. Before he closed the tomb, Ryan and a 
colleague tidied the burial chamber up a bit. At 
a local carpenter’s shop they had a simple cof- 
fin built. They lowered the unknown lady into 
her new bed and closed the lid. Hatshepsut’s 
prolonged period of anonymity was nearing 
its end. 


istorians long cast Hatshepsut in the 
role of evil stepmother to the young 
Thutmose IIT. The evidence of her sup- 
posed cruelty was the payback she posthumously 
received when her stepson had her monuments 
attacked and her kingly name erased from public 
memorials. Indeed, Thutmose III did as thorough 
a job smiting the iconography of King Hatshepsut 
as he had whacking the Canaanites at Megiddo. 


106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


At Karnak her image and cartouche, or name 
symbol, were chiseled off shrine walls; the texts 
on her obelisks were covered with stone (which 
had the unintended effect of keeping them in 
pristine condition). 

At Deir el Bahri, the site of her most spectacu- 
lar architectural achievement, her statues were 
smashed and thrown into a pit in front of her 
mortuary temple. Known as Djeser Djeseru, 
holy of holies, on the west bank of the Nile across 
from modern Luxor, the temple is set against a 
bay of lion-colored cliffs that frame the tawny 
temple stones the way the nemes frames a pha- 
raoh’s face. With its three tiers, its porticoes, its 
spacious ramp-linked terraces, its now vanished 
sphinx-lined causeway and T-shaped papyrus 
pools and shade-casting myrrh trees, Djeser 
Djeseru is among the most glorious temples ever 
built. It was designed (perhaps by Senenmut) to 
be the center of Hatshepsut’s cult. 

Images of her as queen were left undisturbed, 
but wherever she had proclaimed herself king, 
the workers of her stepson followed with their 
chisels, the vandalism careful and precise. “The 
destruction was not an emotional decision; it 
was a political decision,” says Zbigniew Szafran- 
ski, the director of the Polish archaeological 
mission to Egypt that has been working at Hat- 
shepsut’s mortuary temple since 1961. 

By the time excavators cleared the debris 
from the mostly buried temple in the late 1890s, 
the mystery of Hatshepsut had been refined: 
What kind of ruler was she? The answer seemed 
self-evident to a number of Egyptologists quick 
to embrace the idea that Thutmose III had at- 
tacked Hatshepsut’s memory as revenge for her 
shameless usurpation of his royal power. Wil- 
liam C. Hayes, the curator of Egyptian art at the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and a principal at 
the Deir el Bahri excavations in the 1920s and 
°30s, wrote in 1953: “It was not long...before 
this vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman 
showed herself in her true colors.” 

When archaeologists discovered evidence 
in the 1960s indicating that the banishment of 
King Hatshepsut had begun at least 20 years 
after her death, the soap opera of a hotheaded 


THE SOAP OPERA OF A HOTHEADED SON 
WREAKING VENGEANCE FELL APART. 


stepson wreaking vengeance on his unscrupu- 
lous stepmother fell apart. A more logical sce- 
nario was devised around the possibility that 
Thutmose III needed to reinforce the legitimacy 
of his son Amenhotep II’s succession in the face 
of rival claims from other family members. And 
Hatshepsut, once disparaged for ruthless ambi- 
tion, is now admired for her political skill. 

“Nobody can know what she was like,” says 
Catharine Roehrig, now a curator in the same 
department once headed by Hayes. “She ruled 
for 20 years because she was capable of mak- 
ing things work. I believe she was very canny 
and that she knew how to play one person off 
against the next—without murdering them or 
getting murdered herself” 


lose to two decades after Donald Ryan 
C rediscovered the location of KV60, Zahi 

Hawass asked the curators at the Egyp- 
tian Museum to round up all the unidentified 
and possibly royal female mummies from the 
18th dynasty, including the two bodies—one 
thin, one fat—that had been found in KV60. The 
thin mummy was retrieved from storage in the 
museum's attic; the fat one, KV60a, which had 
remained in the tomb where it had been found, 
was transported from the Valley of the Kings. 
Over a four-month period in late 2006 and early 
2007, the mummies passed through a CT scan- 
ner that enabled the archaeologists to examine 
them in detail and to gauge their age and cause 
of death. 

The CT results from the four candidate 
mummies were inconclusive. Then Hawass had 
another idea. A wooden box engraved with Hat- 
shepsut’s cartouche had been found in a great 
cache of royal mummies at Deir el Bahri in 1881; 
it was believed to contain her liver. When the 
box was run through the scanner, the research- 
ers were astonished to detect a tooth. The team 
dentist identified it as a secondary molar with 
part of its root missing. When Ashraf Selim, pro- 
fessor of radiology at Cairo University, reexam- 
ined the jaw images of the four mummies, there 
in the right upper jaw of the fat mummy from 
KV60 was a root with no tooth. “I measured the 


root in the mummy and the tooth, and we found 
that they both matched,’ Selim says. 

To be sure, the scientists have proved only 
that a tooth in a box belongs to a mummy. The 
identification is based on the assumption that 
the contents of the box are properly labeled and 
were once vital parts of the famous female pha- 
raoh, And the box inscribed with Hatshepsut’s 
cartouche is not the typical canopic vessel in 
which mummified organs are found. Its made 
of wood, not stone, and might have been used 
to hold jewelry or oils or small valuables. 

“Some would say we have not found absolute 
proof,’ Selim says. “And I would agree.” 

Still, Hawass asks, what are the odds that a 
box identified with Hatshepsut and found in a 
cache of royal mummies contains a tooth that 
exactly matches a hole in the smile of a mummy 
found next to the beloved nurse of Egypt's great 
female pharaoh? And how marvelous that the 
tooth was there to connect Hatshepsut’s car- 
touche with a mumnyy. “If the embalmer hadn't 
picked it up and put it in with the liver, there is 
no way we would have known what happened 
to Hatshepsut,” Hawass says. 

Already the CT scans have changed history, 
dispelling theories that Hatshepsut might have 
been killed by her stepson. She probably died 
of an infection caused by an abscessed tooth, 
with complications from advanced bone cancer 
and possibly diabetes. Hawass speculates that 
the high priests of Amun may have moved her 
body to the tomb of her nurse to protect it from 
looters; many royalty of the New Kingdom were 
hidden in secret tombs for security. As for the 
DNA tests, the first round began in April 2007 
and has shown nothing definitive. 

“With ancient specimens you never have 
a 100 percent match, because the genetic se- 
quences aren't complete,” says Angélique Cor- 
thals, a professor of biomedicine and forensic 
studies at Stony Brook University in New York 
and one of three consultants working with the 
Egyptians. “We looked at mitochondrial DNA 
for the suspected Hatshepsut mummy and 
her grandmother Ahmose Nefertari. There is 
about a 30 to 35 percent chance that the two 


HATSHEPSUT 107 


















as 
= 


EAS SOND 








4 


, | 





Visitors to the Temple of Amun at Karnak can 
see firsthand how images of Hatshepsut as a 
virile pharaoh were chiseled away years after 
her death. The likely culprit was her stepson, 
who may have hoped to keep her blood relatives 
from using the images to support their own 
claims to the throne. 


samples are not related, but I cannot empha- 
size enough that these are just preliminary re- 
sults.” Another round of tests may soon deliver 
a clearer verdict. 


ast spring photographer Kenneth Gar- 

rett asked Wafaa El Saddik, director of 

the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, to re- 
view a list of Hatshepsut treasures he hoped to 
photograph for this article: a limestone sphinx 
of Hatshepsut from the ruins of her temple, the 
wooden box containing the tooth, a limestone 
bust of Hatshepsut in the guise of the underworld 
god Osiris. El Saddik came to the final item on 
the list: the mummified body of Hatshepsut her- 
self. “You want us to remove the glass?” she asked 
incredulously, as if the mummy, long neglected, 
now possessed something unspeakably precious. 
The photographer nodded. The director shud- 
dered. “This is the history of the world we're talk- 
ing about!” she exclaimed. 

In the end, it was decreed that one of the pan- 
els of glass could be removed from the case in 
the Royal Mummy Room without jeopardizing 
the history of the world. Staring at what was left 
of the great female pharaoh as the lights were be- 
ing set up, I found myself wondering why it was 
so important to authenticate her corpse. On the 
one hand, what could better animate the aston- 
ishing history of ancient Egypt than the actual 
woman preserved in defiance of nature and the 
forces of decay? Here she was now, among us, 
like an ambassador of antiquity. 

On the other hand, what did we want from 
her? Wasn't there something oppressively mor- 
bid about the curiosity that brought millions 
of rubberneckers to the Royal Mummy Rooms 
and made a fetish of the royal dead in the first 
place? The longer I stared at Hatshepsut, the 
more I recoiled from those unfathomable eyes 
and the suffocating fixity of that lifeless flesh. 
Most of us live by the lapwing creed that is the 
antithesis of the pharaohs’ faith: ashes to ashes, 
dust to dust. It struck me how much more of 
Hatshepsut was alive in her texts, where even 
after so many thousands of years, you can still 
feel the flutter of her heart. 0 


110 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 














Hatshepsut’s obelisk, sculpted from a single block 
of granite, soars a hundred feet above the ruins of 
Karnak. Defying the attempts to erase her from 
history, it now stands magnificently as the tallest 
such monument in Egypt. 


HATSHEPSUT 111 





112 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





DRIVEN UNDERGROUND FOR 75 YEARS, 
THE FAITH OF THE RUSSIAN TSARS 
NOW ENJOYS FAVORED STATUS. 





Father Sevastyan meditates on the Gospels at Svyato-Kazansky hermitage, one of 
many Russian Orthodox communities resurrecting across the land. 


Vladlena Fofonova’s husband filmed it all: submersion three times in water, solemn praying, 
and finally the symbolic snipping of hair by Archbishop Vikenty as he baptizes Fofonova at 





Church on the Blood in Yekaterinburg. Millions of Russians have been baptized since the end 
of Soviet rule. Nearly two-thirds of the population now identify themselves as Orthodox. 





Resplendent icons of saints M estored 15th-century Assumption Cathedral 
in Moscow’s Kremlin. Historic seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, where emperors once 





worshipped, the cathedral became a museum during the communist era. The revitaliz 
faith remains conservative, with the liturgy still recited in Old Church Slavonic. 





Tending his flock, Father Sergiy gives Communion to a child at Znamensky Cathedral in 
Tyumen. As many as 50,000 clergy were executed and countless others jailed and defrocked 








+ _ 


during more than seven decades of persecution. Today so many Russians have thronged 
to the priesthood that some clergy worry that many lack spiritual seasoning. 


BY SERGE SCHMEMANN 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GERD LUDWIG 


The new Russia steadily ebbs away on the drive 
out of Moscow. The gridlock and pollution, the 
sprawling malls and billboards of the recent 
boom years give way to the gray suburbs and 
rusting factories of the Soviet era. These in turn 
fade into tall forests of pine and birch, punctu- 
ated by meadows and timeless villages of log 
houses. Now and again a whimsically painted 
steeple breaks the horizon, its gilded cupola 
glittering in the bright spring sun. We're back in 


the glubinka, the “deep” Russia beloved of Slavo- 
philes, exiles, and painters. And we're headed 
for its very heart. 

Our destination is Murom, among the most 
ancient of Russian cities. Arrayed on seven hills 
along the left bank of the Oka River, Murom 
was a proud sentinel on the eastern periphery 
of ancient Rus in medieval times, before the 
empire stretched on, leaving behind a poor pro- 
vincial town rich in monasteries, memories, and 
myths. Soviet rulers tried to suppress many of 
these, and part of the story of Russia today is the 
effort to reconnect with the past. Out here, part 
of that past is also mine. 

Four centuries ago, a pious young woman 
arrived here as the wife of a “husband of good 
birth and prosperous.’ Despite a life of extraor- 
dinary trials—a husband ever away at war, the 


120 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


Prime Minister 
Vladimir Putin kisses 
the body of Patriarch 
Alexy II, a favored 
ally, at his funeral 
last December at the 
Cathedral of Christ 
the Savior in Moscow. 
Alexy’s successor, 
Metropolitan Kirill 
(in white crown), stands 
close. Putin has called 
the church as vital 

to Russia’s security as 
its nuclear shield. 





birth of 13 children and the death of 8, the fam- 
ines, plagues, invasions, and banditry of what 
history calls the Time of Troubles—Juliana Oso- 
rin remained steadfast in her charity and faith. 
After her death in 1604 she was canonized by 
the Russian Orthodox Church as St. Juliana of 
Lazarevo, after the village outside Murom where 
she lived. Her canonization was intended to per- 
suade a people in panic and despair that holi- 
ness could be achieved in the home and family, 
not only through escape to a monastery. My 
mother, born Juliana Ossorguine, is her direct 
descendant and namesake. 

I had been to Murom before, when Russia 
was emerging from another time of troubles. 
It was March 1992. The ice on the Oka was 
melting, and everywhere there was a sense of 
new beginnings. I had been the New York Times 


bureau chief in Moscow during the last years of 
the Soviet state, in the 1980s, and I was back to 
report on the collapse of communist rule and 
the rise of a new Russia. 

It was a giddy and chaotic period, a time of 
confusion and great hopes—for democracy, 
economic freedom, and perhaps most of all, for 
spiritual revival. The Russian Orthodox Church 
was rising everywhere from the ashes of the 
Soviet era, and millions of Russians were rush- 
ing to be baptized. Most were only dimly aware 
of the religious significance of the sacrament but 
eager to reclaim a past and an identity that the 
communists had for 75 years worked to erase. 

Thousands of ruined churches—including 
those the Soviets had used as warehouses, fac- 
tories, or barns—were being restored to their 
original function, and eventually to their former 





splendor. The monumental Cathedral of Christ 
the Savior, destroyed on Stalin's orders in 1931, 
rose anew on the banks of the Moscow River. 
Believers who had gone underground during 
Soviet times emerged and began energetically 
establishing parishes, orphanages, halfway 
houses, and schools. Thousands of men were 
ordained to the priesthood, and thousands 
more—men and women—took monastic vows, 
all yearning to recover a guiding faith. 

For almost a thousand years the Orthodox 
Church, with its magnificent liturgy and ico- 
nography, had been an integral part of Rus- 
sian identity and history. I was Russian enough 





Serge Schmemann is the author of Echoes of a Native 
Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village. Gerd 
Ludwig frequently covers Russia for the Geographic. 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 121 


to feel profoundly moved that the faith of my 
ancestors was coming alive again. At the same 
time, as a Western reporter, I wondered where 
this plunge into the past, often idealized and 
dimly perceived, could lead. Would the Ortho- 
dox Church become a potent force for reform, 
speaking truth to the Kremlin’s power? Or 
would it resume the role it had played over cen- 
turies of tsarist rule and again become an orna- 
ment and tool of an authoritarian state? 

These questions concerned not only the 
church; the future shape of Russia was at stake. 
As Russia scholar James H. Billington, now 
librarian of Congress, wrote a few years after 
the collapse of the Soviet Union: “Whether the 
Orthodox Church can wrest itself from the 
state and become the conscience of the nation 
will be important in determining whether Rus- 
sia can discover a new, democratic and civil 
culture or will return to a dark and threaten- 
ing authoritarianism.” Since then, the darker 
scenario has seemed to play out, with church 
leaders allying themselves with an aggressive, 
antidemocratic Kremlin. But as I returned to 
Murom last year, I wondered if something of 
St. Juliana’s charity and piety lives on in the 
revived church. 

I also had reason to think that an open and 
questioning spirit may have taken root among 
some believers. My father, the Reverend Alex- 
ander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest and 
theologian who, like my mother, was born of 
Russian émigrés, had been well-known among 
dissidents and intellectuals in the Soviet Union 
for his books and his broadcasts over Radio 
Liberty, which the U.S. government beamed 
behind the Iron Curtain. Both thoroughly Rus- 
sian and proudly Western, he lived most of his 
life in the United States and dedicated much of 
it to stripping his faith of its ethnic crust and 
focusing on its universal message. In 2005 the 
diaries he kept from 1973 until his death in 1983 
were published in Russia. To my astonishment, 
they became an instant sensation among many 
Russian believers and thinkers. Why, I wanted 
to learn, were the thoughts of a Western priest 
resonating so powerfully? 


122 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


1991 





Leningrad 
(St. Petersburg) 


v 


Reviving a Church 


The number of people claiming a religious 
affiliation, which had begun to creep upward in 
western Russia, surged after the communist 
collapse in 1991. By 2004 (map at right) 
communities of the dominant Russian 
Orthodox Church had more than tripled in 
number. Other faiths, including Islam and 
several branches of Protestantism, also 
expanded their reach. 


THE MUROM I RETURN TO is little changed, 
Some nightclubs, ATMs, service stations, and 
billboards, to be sure, but whatever wealth seeps 
out of Moscow seems to stop somewhere short 
of here. There’s still no permanent bridge over 
the Oka, only a pontoon bridge in summer. The 
potholes are still treacherous, and the old wood- 
en houses are weathered and listing. There is 
one dramatic change, however: The monasteries 
and churches on the high bluff above the river 
now gleam in restored grandeur. 

Dating to the late 11th century, Spassky Mon- 
astery is one of the oldest in all of Russia. The 
army used it as a barracks until 1995, leaving 
behind a sad and stinking ruin. The Russian 
Orthodox Church assigned a dynamic priest, 
Father Kirill Epifanov, to resurrect the historic 
religious center. He began by building a bakery 


2004 


St. Petersburg 





State-registered Russian 
Orthodox Church communities 0 
per ten million people 


100 400 800 


State-registered 
religious communities 
Communities include regular 
places of worship, monasteries, 
headquarters of religious 


Buddhist majority Islamic majority 


Russian Orthocox jie 
Protestant tins 
\slamic ies 


organizations, and seminaries. Jewish ® 1991 
@ 2004 
Roman Catholic 
JEROME N. COOKSON, NG STAFF Buddhist 
SOURGE: ALEXE! D,KRINDATCHL, Ld 
oATRIARGH ATHENAGORAS ORTHODOX 
INSTITUTE, BERKELEY, CA Other jum 2,000 6,000 10,000 


to sustain his handful of monks. Then, finding 
funds and labor where he could, he rebuilt the 
churches and restored the grounds. The results 
are stunning: Busloads of pilgrims arrive to 
marvel at the medieval splendor. The immacu- 
late grounds include an aviary with peacocks, 
and the thriving bakery fills the air with the 
aroma of freshly baked bread. 

Spassky is but one of hundreds of mon- 
asteries revived in the thaw that began with 
Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 
1980s. In 1987 there were only three mon- 
asteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then 
there were just two seminaries; now there are 
25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, 
from about 2,000 in Gorbachev's time to nearly 
13,000 today. The Russian Orthodox Church 
has grown into a sprawling institution, with 


dozens of publishing houses and hundreds of 
thriving journals, newspapers, and websites. 
When I meet him, Father Kirill has just re- 
turned from a pilgrimage to the Eastern Ortho- 
dox monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece. A 
large man with a room-filling voice and a broad 
black beard, he distributes gifts to his monks 
like a loving but stern parent. Always on the 
move, with his cassock swirling around him, 
he seems the model leader the reviving church 
needs—a pastor and manager bristling with en- 
ergy, enthusiasm, and faith. Yet over tea in his 
vaulted study, Father Kirill is subdued. 
Raising money and restoring buildings is 
the easy part, he says. The pilgrims? Most are 
“religious tourists” who come to accumulate 
totems. Even the monks are here today, off to 
another monastery tomorrow. The church still has 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 123 





Pious in the extreme, a parishioner gasps after plunging into a cross-shaped hole cut into 
Lake Shartash for the Feast of the Epiphany. In Russian Orthodox tradition, the January feast 























no real communal life, no true spiritual revival. 

“The Soviet regime was the product of faith- 
lessness, but at least it allowed real believers to 
live the flame of faith,” he says. “Today we are 
more concerned with fighting sects and ‘ene- 
mies’ than with repentance. These forces are 
tearing the church from within” 

Many of the people who rushed to be bap- 
tized in the first flush of freedom ended their 
religious involvement right there, he says. 
Other priests and believers voice similar la- 
ments about the decline of interest in the faith 
among the Russian rank and file, as well as the 
slide of the official church toward xenophobia 
and nationalism. 

Figures on church attendance are sketchy, 
since the Russian Orthodox Church keeps no 
membership rolls or parish registers. According 


126 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





to Nikolai Mitrokhin, a historian and critic of 
the church, about 60 percent of Russians today 
identify themselves as Orthodox—they may be 
baptized, married, and buried in the church— 
but less than one percent actually enter a church 
at least once a month. Other sources put the 
figure closer to 10 percent. One reason for the 
sparse attendance may be that the Orthodox 
Church is not entirely friendly to people who 
are casual or clueless about its hallowed tradi- 
tions—as I discover in Murom. 

The relics of St. Juliana now repose in the 
bright yellow Church of St. Nicholas on the 
Embankment, perched precariously on a steep 
bluff. As I enter to pay my respects, two babies 
are being christened. The portly priest, sweaty 
and impatient with the young parents and god- 
parents, shows less interest in making the rite 


Covering a penitent’s 
head with his stole, Father 
Rafail hears confession in 
the open at his makeshift 
church in Vorkuta. Children 
readily confess to disobey- 
ing their parents, a legacy, 
the father claimed, of 

the Soviet past, “when 
ideology was put higher 
than a parent's will.” 





understandable than in getting it over with. 

“Come on, come on, undress them,” he barks. 
“How can I put them in the water like this? Let 
him hold the candle. No! In the right hand! 
What are you doing?” The babies scream, the 
cameras flash, the parents fuss, and soon the 
baptisms draw to a close. 

On the other side of the church, a middle-aged 
woman with a white kerchief tied fiercely around 
her head berates me for photographing the relics 
of St. Juliana. “Did the priest bless you to take 
photographs?” she demands. “Photographing 
without a blessing will only bring evil!” 

I recognize her kind from my years in the 
Soviet Union. There were always women like 
her in the few churches that were open in those 
days, women who scrubbed the floors, tended 
the candlestands, and stood through all the 


Obedience and ritual 


have ruled THE RUSSIAN CHURCH 
SINCE 988, WHEN PRINCE VLADIMIR ORDERED HIS PEOPLE 
TO BE BAPTIZED IN THE DNIEPER RIVER. 


services when Soviet disapproval had frightened 
off everyone else. In a sense, they nursed the 
church through its long incarceration. They were 
the custodians of propriety and custom: Stand 
like this! Face the altar! Cover your head! Cross 
yourself! They were insufferable, but the church 
owes them a great debt. So I do what other Rus- 
sians do when confronted by these vigilantes: I 
meekly bow and put away my camera. 

Obedience and ritual have ruled the Russian 
Church ever since the pivotal day in 988 when 
Prince Vladimir, ruler of Kievan Rus, ordered 
his people to be baptized in the Dnieper River. 
According to the legend familiar to every Rus- 
sian, Vladimir had sent envoys abroad in search 
ofa faith for his pagan nation. Those dispatched 
to Constantinople returned home awestruck by 
the Eastern Greek ritual they had witnessed in 
the Hagia Sophia, then the largest cathedral 
in the world. “We knew not whether we were in 
heaven or on earth,” they reported. 

The religion imported by Prince Vladimir 
shaped the Russian nation and was, in turn, 
shaped by it. Orthodox monasteries became 
the spiritual, economic, cultural, and at times, 
defensive core of the nation. The churches that 
spread through Russia were awe-inspiring in 
their magnificence and immutable in their 
ritual. To this day the language of the church is 
an archaic but mellifluous Old Church Slavonic. 
Priests in their glittering vestments are separat- 
ed from the congregation by an elaborate icon 
screen, and choirs sing most of the liturgy, often 
with hymns by Russia's greatest composers. For 
worshippers, the experience is as otherworldly 
as a Baptist service is direct and unadorned. 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 127 


On my first visit to Murom, in 1992, I stood 
in wonder before the reliquary of St. Juliana, 
who was then ensconced in a just reopened 
cathedral. Alongside were the reliquaries of two 
12th-century princes, St. Constantine of Murom 
and his son St. Michael. Constantine had come 
to what was then a hinterland to plant his reli- 
gion and his rule. This was the ancient narrative 
of Russia: righteous warrior-princes who spread 
the Orthodox Kingdom, and tireless workers 
of the church who sustained it through times 
of crisis. Over the centuries Russians came to 
perceive themselves as a people with a unique 
spirituality and mission, as “Holy Russia.” 


THE INTIMIDATING GRANDEUR of Holy Russia 
was much in evidence at the Moscow residence 
of Patriarch Alexy II, the late leader of the Rus- 
sian Orthodox Church. Hushed clerics in black 


128 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + APRIL 2009 





cassocks referred only to “His Holiness.” Huge 
oil canvases on the dark paneled walls depicted 
epic events in Russia’s religious history. Acolytes 
instructed visitors where to stand when His 
Holiness entered the room. 

But the patriarch entered with a smile and 
a hearty greeting (we had met several times in 
the early 1990s). He rang for tea and solicitous- 
ly recommended the chocolates. Although he 
suffered from heart and respiratory problems 
that would prove fatal in less than a year, Alexy 
was still robust and active for a man of 79. “After 
my illness I officiate at services a bit less, but I 
still serve 150 times a year,” he told me. Then, 
with a twinkle in his eye: “Doctors who measure 
my blood pressure say it’s a bit high before a 
service, but always normal afterward.” 

Alexy presided over the Russian Orthodox 
Church from its rebirth in 1990 until his death 


Praying that the cross 
will replace the swastika 
in a young criminal’s 
heart, Father Oleg (in 
gold) gathers inmates for 
baptism at a juvenile 
prison in Bogandinskoye 
—part of the church’s 
renewed social outreach 
effort. “Many had not 
heard of the Bible,” Father 
Oleg said. 





in December 2008. His story is the story of the 
church and its struggle with the state. Born in 
Estonia in 1929 to a family of Russian émigré 
nobility, Alexy served as a priest and bishop for 
40 years under a Soviet regime that reduced 
the church to a barely tolerated “cult” and com- 
pelled “servers of cult” to play a constant, humil- 
iating game of collusion and deception. Alexy 
never denied that he cooperated with the state 
“organs,” but he insisted that everything he did 
was to safeguard the essential functions of the 
church. “In the most difficult days of repression 
the church did not flee into the catacombs,” he 
said. “It sustained the sacraments, the prayers.” 

Alexy made it his personal mission to identify 
the “new martyrs and confessors”—the victims 
of communist persecution who, in the eyes of 
the church, died for their Christian faith. He 
set aside the fourth Saturday after Easter for a 


special service to commemorate at least 20,000 
“enemies of the Soviet state” who, at the height 
of the Great Purge of 1937-38, were shot and 
buried in mass graves just south of Moscow. 

There I joined thousands of Muscovites as the 
patriarch, along with scores of bishops and hun- 
dreds of priests, celebrated the Divine Liturgy. 
Some people pushed lit candles into the grassy 
mounds that now cover the trenches where 
the victims were felled and buried. A modest 
billboard displayed photographs of some who 
died here: a bearded monk, a tousled peasant, 
a Jewish woman, a student—their eyes either 
wide in horror or half-closed in surrender. A 
chart chronicled the numbers killed day-by-day, 
month-by-month. December 10, 1937: 243 exe- 
cuted. Total for the month: 2,376, May 28, 1938: 
230. Total for the month: 1,346. 

There has been some grumbling that the 
church has singled out its own for honor when 
so many others were killed. Indeed, the thou- 
sand bishops, priests, deacons, and nuns who 
died here lie alongside Bolsheviks, monarchists, 
Trotskyites, accused counterrevolutionaries, 
Jews, German communist refugees, kulaks, “so- 
cial misfits,’ and even Moscow's Chinese laun- 
derers, all caught up in Stalin's orgy of death. 

But Patriarch Alexy was resolved: “We are 
now returning to our history. We have to re- 
member it.” He talked as if those long dead were 
his brothers and sisters: “Can you imagine? 
Archimandrite Kronid, the last deputy abbot 
of the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, was 83! They 
brought him out on a stretcher and shot him!” 

The hatred for clerics that burned among 
communist revolutionaries was fueled by a fact 
of history. For centuries the Russian Orthodox 
Church had served as a handmaiden of the 
tsars. The emperor was head of the church, and 
all awards, promotions, and appointments 
passed through the imperial court. 

In 1990 Alexy became the first patriarch since 
the Russian Revolution to be elected without the 
direct interference of the government. “We have 
managed to establish an entirely new relation- 
ship with the state,” he said, “one which never 
existed before.” He insisted the church had no 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 129 


Judgment day arrives at Nov hvinsky cloister when Father Abraham sits down to critique 
icons painted by resident nuns. If the icon of St. Peter, keys to heaven in hand, is to pass his 





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TOMY uayp 


test, the father said, “anyone looking at it must want to pray.” Reviving a tradition that almost 


died during Soviet times, sisters train for as long as a decade to excel at the art. 














intention of becoming a state church, noting 
that he banned his clergy from elected office. 
But critics argue that Alexy and other senior 
prelates have been all too happy to accept the 
trappings of a state church and have done little 
to resist the Kremlin's drift into authoritarianism. 
Although the Russian Constitution calls for the 


separation of church and state, Russia's three post- 
Soviet presidents—Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, 
and Dmitry Medvedev—have made regular, well- 
publicized appearances in church, and Orthodox 
bishops and priests are fixtures at state functions. 
This closeness has fed an impression abroad 
that the Orthodox Church has teamed up with 
the Kremlin to create a new Russian autocracy. 
Church officials deny this. They cite a host of 
differences and unresolved disputes between the 
church and the government, from control over 











132 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





religious antiquities to religious education. If the 
church and state are intertwined, they say, it is in 
a profound and complex search for a new, post- 
Soviet identity. In that search Russia’s imperial 
history offers only a partial template, and the 
final result is far from certain. 

Still, the Orthodox Church’s favored status 
often works to the detriment of other denomi- 
nations and faiths—especially those perceived, 
rightly or wrongly, as Western. 


ON THE FRINGES of the southern city of Rostov- 
on-Don, Alexander Kirillov unlocks the gate 
to a large Baptist church that his community 
recently finished building. The authorities, the 
elder says, seized on a bureaucratic glitch—fail- 
ure to submit an annual form—and shut down 
the association to which the church belongs. 


Above the Arctic Circle, 
a church rises for the 
first time in the former 
gulag city of Vorkuta. 
Father Rafail (left) hopes 
believers will fill its 
spaces, though church 
attendance remains 
low in Russia, with less 
than 10 percent of the 
population considered 
regular worshippers. 





“We're at fault, of course. But they could just as 
easily have sent us a notice reminding us to file 
it” The real reason for the ban, he says, is that 
his church doesn’t belong to the mainstream 
Baptist group sanctioned by the government. 
“They're not used to the fact that there are de- 
nominations other than the ‘official ones, so they 
don't think we have the right to exist,” Kirillov 
says. “The Orthodox Church is the dominant de- 
nomination, so of course they are represented in 
every sphere of authority. I watch the news: They 
open a new artillery institute, new entrants are 
arriving, and there's an Orthodox priest. Why?” 
One reason traces back to the early post- 
Soviet years, when the euphoria of freedom 
gave way to disillusionment with the consum- 
erism, corruption, and chaos that followed. 
Reactionaries in the government and the church 


If the church and state 
are intertw. ined, ITISINA 


PROFOUND SEARCH FOR A NEW, POST-SOVIET IDENTITY, AND 
THE FINAL RESULT IS FAR FROM CERTAIN. 


accused the West of deliberately humiliating 
Russia, fueling suspicion of denominations and 
groups with ties to liberal democracies. In right- 
wing circles, the call went out for Holy Russia to 
return to her roots. 

Some astoundingly dark and retrograde no- 
tions openly circulate in reactionary churches 
and on nationalist websites. One is a drive to 
canonize Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible, two 
of the more noxious characters of Russian his- 
tory who have been reinvented by extremists as 
“defenders of Holy Russia.” 

Outside St. Petersburg, the decaying summer 
palaces of old Russia’s tsars and grand dukes 
overlook the Gulf of Finland. Behind the ruins 
of one such palace stands a tiny, half-restored 
chapel. Inside I come face-to-face with a spec- 
tacle that makes me gasp—a large icon of Joseph 
Stalin. He's not wearing the halo of a saint, but a 
saint is blessing him. 

The icon depicts a legend in which Stalin, 
at the outbreak of World War II, secretly visits 
St. Matryona of Moscow, a blind and paralyzed 
woman to whom many people came for spiritu- 
al guidance until her death in 1952. According 
to the legend she counseled the Soviet dictator 
not to flee Moscow before the invading German 
Army, but to stand firm against the onslaught. 

The chapel’s pastor, Evstafy Zhakoy, is a fiery 
nationalist highly regarded by his flock for his 
charismatic sermons. In an interview with the 
right-wing newspaper Zavtra, he defended the 
icon by explaining that Russia has a long tradi- 
tion of saints blessing warriors before battle. 

“But Stalin was an atheist,” the interviewer 
interjected. 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 133 


The weight of ritual intens 
parishioners in Vorkuta collect banners and icons for a procession through town before 


es on Easter Sunday, holiest day on the Orthodox calendar, as 





midnight Mass. Celebrants plan to walk three miles to their new church’s construction site, 


circle it once, and join in a service that requires them to stand for hours—until dawn. 





“How do you know?” Father Evstafy retorted. 
Two wartime patriarchs proclaimed Stalin a 
believer, “and I will believe them before I believe 
all these liberals and democrats.” 


WHILE IN SOME DARK CORNERS of the church 
priests such as Father Evstafy recast mass mur- 
derers as champions of Holy Russia, many 
mainstream pastors pursue a more enlightened 
agenda: rehabilitating drug abusers, rescuing 
neglected children, and extending Christ's for- 
giveness to criminals. 

In a brightly lit foster home in St. Petersburg, 
four-year-old Nikita shows me his toys and 
proudly tells me that his mama will soon give 
him a gift. He doesn’t yet understand that he 
has just been placed in this home because his 
mother is a drug addict—a fast-growing blight 
in Russia—and she can no longer care for him. 

Father Alexander Stepanov has been caring 
for castoffs ever since he left a job in physics to 
join the priesthood some 20 years ago. “I was 
ordained right into prison,” he quips, recalling 
how he started his ministry by discussing the 
Bible with inmates. “I had no idea about that 
world of gold teeth and tattoos.” 

All private humanitarian work had been 
strictly banned in the Soviet Union—social 
problems don’t exist in a workers’ paradise— 
but after the collapse of communism, Father 
Alexander found no shortage of people willing 
to plunge in, and Western churches were quick 
to offer help. Today, working out of two restored 
buildings on St. Petersburg’s waterfront, Father 
Alexander oversees a parish church, a foster 
home, an orphanage, a halfway house for teen- 
agers in trouble, and a corps of volunteers who 
visit hospitals and prisons. He also has a radio 
station in the attic, and the offices of a summer 
camp in the basement. No space is wasted, and 
no time—his cell phone rings (to the tone of 
church bells) repeatedly. 

Many churches now have some form of out- 
reach, and there are plenty of volunteers, Father 
Alexander says. But the government is jealously 
seeking to reclaim its monopoly on social work. 
“The government doesn’t want to support the 


136 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 


Painted eggs and iced 
sweet breads await 

a priest’s blessing at 
Easter daybreak in 
Vorkuta. For many 
Russians awakening 
to their country’s 
traditional faith, the 
attraction is national- 
istic. But among the 
deep believers, said 

a clergyman, “their 
souls long for spiri- 
tual food.” 





social initiatives of the church,” he says sadly, 
“Tt forces us to beg for scraps.” 

In offering little or no resistance to the “dark 
and threatening authoritarianism” James H. Bil- 
lington warned of 15 years ago, the church has 
failed a crucial test. Yet no one who has wit- 
nessed the enormous love and labor that has 
gone into restoring churches and reviving chari- 
table work can doubt that something good and 
promising has also awakened in Russia. 

As I walk through an orphanage in St. Peters- 
burg or a restored monastery in Murom, I am 
amazed at the mere fact that a religion so ruth- 
lessly repressed for so long has been born anew. 
And I begin to understand why my father’s dia- 
ries have had such resonance among many Rus- 
sians. The journal he kept for the last ten years 
of his life was a voyage through the ideas, books, 


discoveries, struggles, and joys of an Orthodox 
believer and priest. He endured many of the same 
frustrations and sorrows Russians have known in 
this latest time of troubles, yet however tough the 
battle—even his final battle with cancer—he, like 
St. Juliana, accepted them as the norm of a Chris- 
tian life. That was the heart of it: In this Western 
priest's daily life and thought, the Russians found 
an affirmation that their own doubts and frustra- 
tions and confusion were not wrong, that they 
were, in fact, normal, as long as they remained 
steadfast in faith and charity. 


IT’S SUNDAY MORNING in Murom, and I wake 
early to the tolling of church bells. Pilgrims 
are gathering in the monastery, but Father Kirill’s 
kindly housekeeper offers to drive me to Lazarevo, 
St. Juliana’s village. The old church where 





she worshipped has finally been reopened. 

We drive past abandoned Soviet military 
factories to a muddy cluster of wooden houses 
around the large, battered church, still undergo- 
ing restoration. Piles of bricks and bags of ce- 
ment are stacked by the walls, and the door is 
reached over a bridge of wobbly boards. Inside, 
a modest icon screen has been set up at one side 
altar; on the other side rests an icon of Juliana. 

Two dozen local people, most of them wom- 
en, gather for the Sunday liturgy. There is no 
fuss, no politics, no soul-searching, just a quiet 
appeal to a modest woman who lived, prayed, 
and suffered here, much as they have: “O blessed 
one, intercede also for the Russian land, and for 
all who are in dispersion, that they may receive 
peace and prosperity, and all the more return to 
thine ancient piety....” 0 


RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 137 


THE VANISHING 


We are witnessing 
eu aalctsisnsy(llaceie)ar 
I\aKs) olen iv lare|6lsais 
delivering the fatal blow 
ovanrclaaclanleaiie)icias 
already hit by habitat 
Koxsiovm of@)|[Ult(e)amrelare 
ol[aatel(oneatclaletes 

But unprecedented 
fosercl(@akelalen(os@els) 
efforts may offer a 
lifeline to species 
o)ahiatcnce(e(on 





BY JENNIFER S. HOLLAND 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOEL SARTORE 


138 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 





SURO STREAM FROG - Hyloscirtus pantostictus 
At Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador 
UP TO 2.5 INCHES - SOUTH AMERICA - ENDANGERED 








E GRIPS HIS MATE, front legs clasped 

tight around her torso, Splayed beneath 

him like an open hand, she lies with 
her egg-heavy belly soaking in the shallow 
stream. They are harlequin frogs of a rare Ate- 
lopus species, still unnamed and known only in 
a thin wedge of the Andean foothills and adja- 
cent Amazonian lowlands. The female appears 
freshly painted—a black motif on yellow, her 
underside shocking red. She is also dead. 

Above this tableau, at the lip of the ravine, a 
bulldozer idles. Road construction here, near the 
town of Limon in southeastern Ecuador, has sent 
an avalanche of rocks, broken branches, and dirt 
down the hillside, choking part of the forest-lined 
stream. Luis Coloma steps gingerly over the loose 
rocks, inspecting the damage to the waterway. 
The 47-year-old herpetologist is bespectacled 
and compact in a yellow shirt dotted with tiny 
embroidered frogs. He hasn't bothered to roll up 
his khaki pants, which are soaked to the knees. 
Poking a stick into the debris, he says, “They have 
destroyed the house of the frog.” 

Frogs and toads, salamanders and newts, 
wormlike (and little-known) caecilians—these 
are the class Amphibia: cold-blooded, creep- 
ing, hopping, burrowing creatures of fairy tale, 
biblical plague, proverb, and witchcraft. Medi- 
eval Europe saw frogs as the devil; for ancient 





Jennifer S. Holland is a senior writer for National 
Geographic. Joel Sartore is a frequent contributor to 
the magazine, often photographing threatened species. 


BOREAL TOAD 
Anaxyrus (Bufo) boreas 
At the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Colorado 
UP TO 5 INCHES - WESTERN UNITED STATES - DECLINING 








Egyptians they symbolized life and fertility; 
and for children through the ages they have 
been a slippery introduction to the natural 
world. To scientists they represent an order that 
has weathered over 300 million years to evolve 
into more than 6,000 singular species, as beauti- 
ful, diverse—and imperiled—as anything that 
walks, or hops, the Earth. 

Amphibians are among the groups hardest 
hit by today’s many strikes against wildlife. As 
many as half of all species are under threat. 
Hundreds are sliding toward extinction, and 
dozens are already lost. The declines are rapid 
and widespread, and their causes complex— 
even at the ravine near Lim6n the bulldozer is 
just one hazard of many. But there are glimmers 
of hope. Rescue efforts now under way will shel- 
ter some animals until the storm of extinction 
passes. And, at least in the lab, scientists have 
treated frogs for a fungal disease that is devas- 
tating populations around the world. 

In Quito, Coloma and his colleague Santiago 
Ron have established a captive-breeding facil- 
ity for amphibians at the zoological museum 
at Pontificia Universidad Catdlica del Ecuador. 
They admit it’s a drop in the pond, offering safe 
harbor to a select few in hopes of stemming 
national losses. The facility houses just 16 spe- 
cies, although Ecuador is home to more than 
470. And that's just what's on the books. Despite 
heavy deforestation across this country, every 
year new species are discovered. Coloma’s lab 
has about 60 recently discovered species still 


COMMON FIRE SALAMANDER 
Salamandra salamandra 
At the St. Louis Zoo, Missouri 
UP TO 10 INCHES - EUROPE - DECLINING 










Scientists in Ecuador's Andes test an Atelopus frog for chytrid fungus (result: 
positive). The frog's breeding stream was clogged with construction debris. 
Forest clearing, aridity, and infectious disease are proving a lethal mix for a 
host of species in the amphibian-rich Southern Hemisphere. 


OOPHAGA SYLVATICA PRISTIMANTIS SP. GOLDEN POISON FROG 
At Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador At Reserva Las Gralarias, Ecuador Phyllobates terribilis 
UP TO 1.5 INCHES « SOUTH AMERICA - DECLINING UP TO 2 INCHES - ECUADOR - STATUS UNKNOWN, At Rolling Hills Zoo, Salina, Kansas 


UP TO 2 INCHES - COLOMBIA - ENDANGERED 






— 
at. 





By 2000, teams were grabbing up animals to stash them away— 
at zoos, at hotels, anywhere space could be carved out. 


awaiting scientific names—enough to keep ten 
taxonomists hard at work for a decade. 
Coloma and Ron, who have also initiated 
land purchases for habitat protection, hope to 
add room at the captive facility for more than a 
hundred species. But the pool of wild animals is 
shrinking fast. Where field scientists once had to 
watch their step to avoid crushing frogs moving 
in mass migrations, now counting a dozen feels 
like a victory. “We're becoming paleontologists, 
describing things that are already extinct,’ Ron 
says. At the Quito lab the evidence is stacked 


The protein keratin is the target of 
chytrid fungus. Frogs have more of it 
than tadpoles, making them more 


vulnerable to infection, i Keratin 


high. Coloma holds up one jar from a cabinet- 
ful. Two pale specimens bob in alcohol. “This 
species,” he says, his face distorted through the 
glass, “went extinct in my hands.” 


IT'S NO WONDER some view our time on Earth 
as a mass extinction. Biodiversity losses today 
have reached levels not seen since the end of 
the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. 
Yet amphibians were able to hold on through 
past extinction spasms, surviving even when 
95 percent of other animals died out, and 
later when the dinosaurs disappeared. If not 
then, why now? 

“Today’s amphibians have taken not just 
a one-two punch, but a one-two-three-four 
punch. It's death by a thousand cuts,” says Uni- 
versity of California, Berkeley, biologist David 
Wake. Habitat destruction, the introduction of 
exotic species, commercial exploitation, and 
water pollution are working in concert to deci- 
mate the world’s amphibians. The role of climate 
change is still under debate, but in parts of the 
Andes, scientists have recorded a sharp increase 
in temperatures over the past 25 years along 
with unusual bouts of dryness. 

But a form of fungal infection, chytridio- 
mycosis (chytrid for short), often administers 
the coup de grace. It did for the mating pair in 


CSD 


the Limon stream. Both animals tested posi- 
tive for chytrid fungus, and the male died soon 
after the female. 

Chytrid was wiping out amphibians in Costa 
Rica back in the 1980s, although no one knew 
it at the time. When frogs started dying in big 
numbers in Australia and Central America in 
the mid-1990s, scientists discovered the fungus 
was to blame. It attacks keratin, a key structural 
protein in an animal's skin and mouthparts, per- 
haps hampering oxygen exchange and control 
of water and salts in the body. African clawed 


frogs, exported widely for pregnancy tests 
beginning in the 1930s, may have been the 
initial carriers of the fungus. “It’s amazing we 
haven't seen even more population crashes, 
the way we shuffle things all over the world, 
complete with pathogens,’ notes Ross Alford of 
Queensland's James Cook University. 

Chytrid is now reported on all continents 
where frogs live—in 43 countries and 36 U.S. 
states. It survives at elevations from sea level to 
20,000 feet and kills animals that are aquatic, 
land-loving, and those that jump the line. 
Locally it may be spread by anything from a 
frog's legs to a bird's feathers to a hiker’s muddy 
boots, and it has afflicted at least 200 species. 
Gone from the wild are the Costa Rican golden 
toad, the Panamanian golden frog, the Wyoming 
toad, and the Australian gastric-brooding 
frog, to name a few. Some scientists play down 
the importance of any single factor in over- 
all declines. But in a 2007 paper, Australian 
researcher Lee Berger and colleagues, who first 
laid blame on the fungus, put it this way: “The 
impact of chytridiomycosis on frogs is the most 
spectacular loss of vertebrate biodiversity due to 
disease in recorded history.” 

It’s been a time of desperate measures. For 
example, after Southern Illinois University 
researcher Karen Lips and colleagues reported 





MARIEL FURLONG, NG STAFF. SOUROES: LEE BERGER AND RICK SPEARE, JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY 


fungus-related declines in Costa Rica and 
Panama in the late 1990s, they began mapping 
chytrid’s path and predicting its victims. By 
2000, teams were grabbing up animals from the 
most vulnerable species to stash them away—at 
zoos, at hotels, anywhere temporary space could 
be carved out for stacks of aquariums. Sick 
frogs were treated and quarantined. Many were 
exported (with much political wrangling) to 
US. zoos, while a Panamanian facility was built 
to house nearly a thousand animals. So began 
the Amphibian Ark, a growing international 











venture aimed at keeping at least 500 species 
in captivity for reintroduction when—if—the 
crisis is resolved. But the task is immense and 
expensive, and there’s no guarantee how many 
healthy wild places will be left for amphibians 
to recolonize. 


THE TROPICS, where conditions foster high 
amphibian biodiversity, have seen the most 
dramatic declines. But more temperate climates 
haven't been spared. Consider the cold, upper 
reaches of the Sierra Nevada of California. Here, 


NORTH. 
Re Ber SD §. Bareape 
re re 
Chytrid on the March sao * : ae , 
Global data reveal the alarming reach .? 
of amphibian chytridiomycosis, first + 
reported in the wild in Australia, but " ERICA n 
likely originating in Africa. 
bid 
AMERICA J : 
. : 












@!996 


In Central America (above) the 
fungus has moved like a 
wave—spreading up to 27 miles 
a year. In 2008 it jumped the 
Panama Canal, putting that 
country's eastern amphibian 
populations in the line of fire. 


PACIFIC 
OCEAN 


NGM MAPS 

CENTRAL AMERICA DATA: KAREN R, LIPS, SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY. 
CHYTRID SAMPLING DATA; DEANNA H. OLSON AND KATHRYN L. RONNENBERG, 
U.S. FOREST SERVICE; MATTHEW C, FISHER, IMPERIAL COLLEGE. UK. 





a 


Chytrid sampling sites as of 2008. 


Surveys in Asia are under way, td rd 
@ Positive 
@ Negative 


Caribbean 


Sea 2008 












PANAMA = gt 
CANAL 9 = Wess 
a 
‘anama f 
City 
Omi 100 
wo - 
Okm 100 


VANISHING AMPHIBIANS 145 





In the wild, Pacific horned frogs breed explosively during good rains and burrow under- 
ground most other times. Conversion of scrub and sandy habitat for agriculture is reducing 
frog numbers, but now the species is reproducing in captivity for the first time. 





PACIFIC HORNED FROG - Ceratophrys stolzmanni 
At Pontificia Universidad Catdlica del Ecuador 
UP TO 3 INCHES - ECUADOR AND PERU - VULNERABLE 





A display of species deemed “likely extinct” illustrates Ecuador's profound loss of biodiversity 
in recent years, “It is a disaster,” says herpetologist Luis Coloma. One step forward: The country's 
new constitution protects natural resources, which could lead to fewer specimens under glass. 


\ 


Y 





Hd w 


Captivity is the last resort for Gastrotheca pseustes (above) and 15 other 
endangered species, more than 900 individuals total, at Pontificia Universidad 
Catdlica in Quito. A staff of seven, a few volunteers, and about $100,000 a 
year now support the breeding facility. Expansion plans will beg more funds. 













ORNATE HORNED FROG REINWARDT'S TREE FROG MARSUPIAL FROG 
Ceratophrys ornata Rhacop! wardtii Gastrotheca psel 
At the Tennessee Aquarium the Knox’ 0, Tennessee At Pontificia Universidad Catdlic | Ecuador 





UP TO 4 INCHES - SOUTHERN SOUTH AMER' 





UP TO 2.5 INCHES - ECUAD 





GERED 





at 11,000-foot-high Sixty Lake Basin, stands a 
stark paradise of granite towers made famous 
through the lens of Ansel Adams, where alpine 
lakes once roiled in summer with hearty frog 
populations, The most common species is the 
mountain yellow-legged frog—subtly pretty, 
tinged yellow on torso and limbs, spotted brown 
and black. But recently this palm-size frog has 
been hard to find. 

A slender man with a camper’s stubble and a 
soft demeanor squats at the side of pond number 
100, bordered by stoic rock walls and edged with 
pink mountain heather and tangled grasses. 
Vance Vredenburg is a biologist at San Francisco 
State University, and he’s been studying the 
mountain yellow-legged frog for 13 years, slum- 
ming in a tent on the mountainside for weeks at 
a time as he monitors 80 different study lakes. 
Today, mosquito net balled up around his neck, 
he contemplates ten dead frogs, stiff-legged, 
white bellies going soft in the sun. 

“Tt wasn’t long ago when you walked along 
the bank of this pond,” he recalls, “a frog leapt 
at every other step. Youd see hundreds of them 
alive and well, soaking in the sun in a writhing 
mass.’ But in 2005, when the biologist hiked up 
to his camp anticipating another season of long- 
term studies, “there were dead frogs everywhere. 
Frogs I'd been working with for years, that I'd 
tagged and followed through their lives, all dead. 
I sat down on the ground and cried.” 

Vredenburg’s biggest remaining study popu- 
lation, in pond number 8, has about 35 adults. 








Most of the rest of the animals he’s known in 
this place are gone. What happened here is the 
perfect example of those multiple punches— 
a case study of how a thriving species can get 
knocked to its knees. 

It started with the trout. 

Until the late 19th century, the Sierra Nevada 
was mostly fishless above the waterfalls. But 
state policy of fish stocking eventually climbed 
to the high Sierra to transform those “barren” 
lakes into a fisherman's paradise. The California 
Department of Fish and Game began sending 
trout up the cliffs, first in barrels on muleback, 
and by the 1950s in the bellies of airplanes. (The 
planes would fly over the water and let drop their 
living cargo, much of which missed its mark and 
was left flopping on dry land.) All told, more 
than 17,000 mountain lakes were stocked. 

As it turns out, trout eat tadpoles and young 
frogs. As trout multiplied, frogs disappeared. 

Vredenburg’s work in Sixty Lake Basin 
became an attempt to restore the lakes to their 
pre-1900s fishless status in order to bring back 
the frogs. He unfurled wide nets bank to bank, 
reeled them in, and disposed of the catch (often 
on the grill with a little salt and pepper). Eventu- 
ally the National Park Service took over the proj 
ect, and now 14 lakes are fish-free or virtually 
so. As more fish were netted out, Vredenburg 
says, the “frogs started to recolonize; the lakes 
were coming back to life.” 

But then came another blow. Chytrid, which 
had already invaded Yosemite National Park, 














BUDGETT'S FROG - Lepidobatrachus laevis 
At the National Aquarium, Baltimore, Maryland 
UP TO 4 INCHES - SOUTH AMERICA « DECLINING 


Amphibians have evolved into 6,000 singular species as 
beautiful, diverse—and imperiled—as any on Earth. 


arrived in Sixty Lake Basin and swept from lake 
to lake, around a hundred of them, in a predict- 
able and deadly line. After removing fish and 
restoring habitat, “to have this disease wipe the 
frogs out again—it breaks my heart,” he says. 

Oddly, the fungus infects but doesn't kill tad- 
poles, which is why wriggling schools remain 
in otherwise lifeless ponds. Mountain yellow- 
legged frogs take some six years to mature. 
“Those tadpoles are from years ago—there’s 
been no breeding in this pond since chytrid 
arrived,” Vredenburg explains. “As soon as they 
transform into frogs, they'll die” 

Yet Vredenburg remains doggedly optimis- 
tic. He calls pond number 8 his victory pond. 
When he saw the frogs start to die, he removed 
some of the adults and treated them with an 
antifungal medication, then put them back. 
The population—though tiny—has now been 
stable for three years running. Vredenburg 
plans to apply his painstaking capture-treat- 
release method to animals in other ponds 
in Sixty Lake Basin. (Recently announced, a 
similar treatment project by a U.K. team aims 
to mitigate disease in the Mallorcan midwife 
toad of Spain.) If enough fungal spores can be 
cleared from frogs’ bodies, he says, the disease 
may lose its hold. 

Other sites are also yielding good news. Some 
amphibians aren't affected by the fungus or can 
carry it without being hobbled. Certain Costa 
Rican tree frogs have skin pigments that allow 
them to bask in the sun without drying out, 
killing the fungus with heat. Most encourag- 
ing, Reid Harris of James Madison University 
and colleagues have found an innate defense 
in salamanders and some frogs: symbiotic skin 
bacteria that inhibit chytrid infection. (Some 
naturally occurring skin proteins show similar 
fungus-fighting properties.) “If we can augment 
the good bacteria to help lower transmission, 


Gaping defensively, a single Budgett’s 
frog stands among many in the fight for 
amphibian survival. Researchers have 
ramped up the search for solutions, and 
each small victory breeds new hope. 


there may be time for the animals to ramp up 
their own immunity,” Harris says. “And we 
wouldn't be putting anything into the environ- 
ment that isn’t already there. Perhaps we can 
stop the epidemic outbreaks of chytrid” 

Upcoming Amphibian Ark projects may help 
researchers test these measures. In Panama, 
chytrid has only recently jumped the canal and 
begun a march eastward toward the still pristine 
Darién Province, where at least 121 amphib- 
ian species are known. One rescue facility is 
already up and running there; U.S. and Pana- 
manian partners are now planning another— 
in part for research into how to boost enough 
healthful skin microbes in wild populations 
to stop the fungus cold. If the strategy works, 
the golden frog, for one, may be returned in 
healthy numbers to Panama's forests. Mean- 
while, in frog-rich Ecuador, Coloma and Ron 
have petitioned the government for an environ- 
mental audit of the Limon road project. Con- 
struction has ceased for now, and some habitat 
restoration may be done. Though perhaps too 
late to save the choked stream’s animals, 
media attention there could help future land 
preservation efforts. 


WHY CARE ABOUT FROGS? “I could give you a 
thousand reasons,” says Coloma. Because their 
skin acts not only as a protective barrier but 
also as a lung and a kidney, they can provide an 
early warning of pollutants. Their insect prey 
carries human pathogens, so frogs are an ally 
against disease. They serve as food for snakes, 
birds, even humans, playing a key role in both 
freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. “There 
are places where the biomass of amphibians 
was once higher than all other vertebrates com- 
bined,’ says David Wake. “How can you take 
that out of the ecosystem without changing it 
in a major way? There will be ecological conse- 
quences that we haven't yet grasped.” 

“The story is much bigger than frogs,” says 
Vredenburg. “It’s about emerging disease and 
about predicting, coping with, and fighting 
things we don't fully understand. It’s about all 
of us. Everyone should care” O 


VANISHING AMPHIBIANS 153 


WWNSIDE GEOGRAPHIC 


Covered head to toe 
in white to match a 
snowy Svalbard ridge, 
Paul Nicklen patiently 
waits for polar bears. 


on assignment IC@mMan Parked deep in the snow as 

a blizzard raged, photographer Paul Nicklen hoped a polar bear 
would saunter by and provide a shot for this month’s Svalbard story. 
“Svalbard bears are not hunted, so they're relaxed and approach 
quite closely,” he says. For three hours Nicklen sat with freezing 
hands and ice-crystal-covered lashes, yet the perfect moment was 
elusive. One female did come by, but just to munch the seat of his 
snowmobile. She visited his cabin later (see page 75). Tragically, 

a few days after taking this picture, Nicklen’s guide and friend Karl 
Erik Wilhelmsen suffered a fatal fall through the sea ice. 


154 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * APRIL 2009 PHOTO: KARL ERIK WILHELMSEN 


peda 





Pat Minnick included National Geographic 
in her financial plans. 


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GEOGRAPHIC 


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Give An Inspiring Gift 


In 2007 Pat Minnick, a professional artist, 
decided to establish a charitable gift annuity 
to support National Geographic. She now 
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For more information about a charitable gift 
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INSIDE GEOGRAPHIC 





Zahi Hawass exam- 
ines the mummy of 
Hatshepsut in Cairo’s 
Egyptian Museum. 


Oil Painting That's not 
just any ebony puddle oozing 
across this issue’s “Crude 
Currents” piece on oil spills: 

It's actual Venezuelan crude. 
Researcher Mary McPeak spent 
hours tracking down the stuff, 
then—since it qualifies as a haz- 
ardous substance—had to find 
out about its proper handling 
and disposal to get it shipped to 
Geographic headquarters. There 
design editor Oliver Uberti (at 
right) artfully drizzled the goo 
and tried to survive its fumes. 


Unveiled Probably no man in the world knows more Egyptian 
mummies—or more about them—than Zahi Hawass, secretary gen- 
eral of that country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and director of 
the Egyptian Mummy Project. The National Geographic explorer-in- 
residence checked in with his (very old) friend Hatshepsut, subject 
of this month’s “The King Herself,” when a panel was removed from 
her display case to give photographer Ken Garrett a better view. 
Hawass was leader of the effort to identify the remains as those 

of the fabled female ruler from ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty. 





Photographer Rebecca Hale (at left) and Oliver Uberti do some dirty work. 


PHOTOS: KENNETH GARRETT (TOP); CHRISTY STEELE, NG STAFF 


INSPIRING PEOPLE 
TO CARE ABOUT THE PLANET 
SINCE 1888 





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Photograph by Norbert Rosing © NGS 


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INSIDE GEOGRAPHIC 


upvate Good News for Gorillas Last July National 
Geographic (left) reported on a dire situation in the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo's Virunga National Park. In 2007, as a warn- 
ing to the warden who'd thwarted a thriving illegal charcoal trade, 
local men killed seven of the park’s mountain gorillas. Only 720 of 
the animals are left in the world. Soon additional violence in the 
park between rebels and government troops drove out Virunga’s 
rangers entirely, and the mountain gorillas were left unprotected. 
Now the rangers are back. Virunga park director Emmanuel de 
Merode negotiated their return with rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. 
“It's a case of conservation ahead of politics,” says photographer 
Brent Stirton, who has long covered the conflict. And the conserva- 
tion news is good: Rangers discovered that five gorilla babies had 
been born in the 15 months since they'd last seen their charges. 








Documenting recent gorilla births in Virunga National Park, ranger Innocent Mburanumwe meets a new arrival. 


PHOTO: BRENT STIRTON, REPORTAGE BY GETTY IMAGES 


INSIDE GEOGRAPHIC 


NATIONAL 
GEOGRAPHIC 
CHANNEL 


Canine Rehab 

Barney lived in a puppy mill 

in West Virginia, confined to 

a cage, his skin mangy and 
flecked with feces. Today the 
shih tzu is “living the good life” 
in Manhattan, says Chris Valen- 
tini, producer of Dogtown, the 
second season of which airs on 
Fridays at 10 p.m. Ten episodes 
will track rescue and rehabilita- 
tion efforts at Dogtown, part of 
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary 
in Utah. Besides Barney, the 
new season's stars include two 
street dogs from Ethiopia and 
Lucas, a pit bull that was forced to fight, found a peaceful life at Dogtown. a biting bloodhound. 





Polar Circling 
Naturalists are always on duty 
as the Lindblad Expeditions ship 
National Geographic Explorer 
cruises around the Arctic Sval- 
bard islands. Taking advantage 
of 24-hour daylight, they look 
for rare birds, crashing ice cliffs, 
floating polar bears (right)—and 
they'll wake sleeping passengers 
who don't want to miss a thing. 
Photographers are on hand as 
well to serve as mentors. Lind- 
blad’s Svalbard trip is now avail- 
able with five July departures. 





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FLASHBACK 





The Coming Plague A cloud of plague locusts descends on a field outside 
Melbourne, Australia, in 1955. Such swarms usually occur in years of plentiful rain, when 
conditions are most favorable for successive generations to reproduce quickly. But locusts 
can and do travel great distances, so even drought-stricken regions can be stormed by the 
hungry bugs. Last year was a particularly good year for Australian plague locusts—and a 
bad year for those who had to live with them. In Victoria state, motorists were urged to be 
wary of swarms. “As their fat-laden bodies can measure up to 42mm [1.6 inches],” warned 
Michael Case of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, “when they impact on a windscreen 
they literally explode. This leaves a sticky residue that may render windscreen wipers 
useless and can very quickly obscure a driver’s vision.” —Margaret G. Zackowitz 





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Text Flex6 to 4Ford (43673) for more info.** 


“Optional features. Driving while distracted can result in loss of vehicle control. Only 
use mobile phones and other devices, even with voice commands, when it is safe 
to do so. **Standard text messaging and other rates apply. Appropriate charges will 
appear on your wireless phone bill. Service available on participating carriers. 


FLEX 





Drive one.